Michael Zimmer.org

File this under “duh” – via Wired Threat Level:
Wikipedia’s functionality was returning to normal Tuesday after an internet watchdog group removed the online encyclopedia from a child porn watchlist.
The brouhaha began Saturday, when the England-based Internet Watch Foundation placed Wikipedia on a watchlist because of the encyclopedia’s entry about the German rock band, Scorpions. The cover art of its 1976 album, Virgin Killer, shows a nude young girl on the cover. In response to the blacklisting, British internet service providers filtered out the entry and pushed the site through a …

Let’s say you run an internet company whose primary function is to help individual locate and access information available on the World Wide Web. Let’s say your mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” and you’re very good at it, processing over half of every Web search performed in the United States.
Now, let’s also note that you are good people, always trying to do the right thing, not be evil, and so on. As such, you likely recognize the following statements as being …

John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain have published a wonderful opinion piece at CNet about how Internet companies struggle with certain “gray zones” of complicity with oppressive regimes and their desire to filter and censor Web content. They try to provide answers to the question “what’s a corporation to do” when confronted with requests that are “squarely at odds with the law, norms or ethics of the corporation’s home country”:
Should a search engine agree to censor its search results as a condition of doing business in a new place? Should …

No, that’s not a new slogan for the Thai tourism bureau. Instead, it’s the sad reality that Google is again aiding and abetting foreign governments’ desires to censor speech and limit access to knowledge.
Although freedom of speech was guaranteed by the 1997 Constitution of Thailand, Lèse majesté laws remain largely in effect, making any criticism of the King a crime. Well, guess what. Some YouTube videos were deemed critical of His Majesty, and the Thai government temporarily blocked the site and threatened to sue Google. Of the twelve “offending” …

Unfortunately, Google’s shareholders have rejected the anti-censorship proposal that aimed to ensure that the important human value of access to knowledge would be adhered to by the company who pledges to “do no evil.” To say I’m not surprised is an understatement.

New York City Comptroller William Thompson, Jr. has issued a petition on behalf of the New York City Pension Funds (which owns $276.2 million in Google stock) urging Google to take steps to counteract internet censorship in foreign countries with authoritarian government such as China, Egypt and Iran. While Google’s board has voted down the proposal, shareholders will now have the chance to vote on the proposal in the current proxy statement for its annual meeting of stockholders on May 10.
Here’s the full text of the proposal:

Whereas, freedom of speech …

Boing Boing has two good posts detailing how Google has been cooperating with Mumbai and Brazilian authorities to help censor content and track down offenders on their Orkut social networking service.
In the Mumbai case:
The Indian Express and other regional media are reporting that Google’s social networking service Orkut will cooperate with the Mumbai Police to share IP addresses of users who post “objectionable content” on Orkut. If reports are to be believed, the police need only email a complaint to Orkut, and Orkut will send back the personally identifying data, …

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped has published an unofficial Google Censorship FAQ where he answers over 35 questions related to Google’s censorship activities. Highlights include:
What does Google censor?
It depends on the country. In Germany, Google censors certain Nazi websites like Stormfront.org, for example. In the US, Google censors sites containing child pornography, Google’s Sergey Brin stated. In China, Google also censors human rights groups, like HRW.org (Human Rights Watch), but many other things as well, like “台独” (Taiwan independence), names of current and past presidents, names of locations, historical events …