Brussels: Authorities have sent around 1,000 requests to the giant search engine Google to take down content from its search results or YouTube video in the last six months of 2011, the company said on Monday.
The company denounced the move, saying it was an alarming trend.
Google sad in its twice-yearly Transparency Report that the requests were aimed at having some 12,000 items overall removed, about a quarter more than during the first half of last year, Reuters reported.
“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different,” Dorothy Chou, the search engine’s senior policy analyst, said in a blogpost. “We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not.”
Many of those requests targeted political speech, keeping up a trend Google said it has noticed since it started releasing its Transparency Report in 2010.
“It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,” said Chou. (http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/more-transparency-into-government.html)
In the second half of last year, Google complied with around 65 percent of court orders and 47 percent of informal requests to remove content, it said.
Google and many other online providers maintain that they cannot lawfully remove any content for which they are merely the host and not the producer, a principle enshrined in EU law on eCommerce since 2000.
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