The search giant not available in Iran

Sep 17, 2007 13:24 GMT  ·  By

After countries such as Thailand or Turkey, Iran also restricted the access to Google, but it didn't provide any reason for this action. However, the country's officials said for AFP that they will deny the access to several resources because they were flagged as offensive. In case you didn't know, Iran is one of the countries which are very exigent when it comes to the content published on the Internet. AFP reports that Google and Gmail became unavailable in the entire country as well as some other websites from all around the world. Obviously, the restriction was applied by the country's ISPs which removed the access straight from their servers.

"The programs work by honing in on key words which trigger the blocking of a site, which means that some perfectly anodyne sites are inaccessible as well as more sensitive ones," AFP wrote in an article published today.

"The filtering aims to prevent Iranians from accessing decadent material posted abroad, a similar goal to the ban on satellite dishes which are subject to period crackdowns."

As I already said, this is not the first time when Google is blocked into an entire country, as the Mountain View company encountered several such problems in the past, too. However, the restrictions were actually meant to ban YouTube, the popular video sharing service that is also owned by Google. A long time ago, the Turkish authorities took the decision of banning the entire service as it contained offensive clips uploaded by the users. After the Google officials worked with the authorities to remove the clips, the product became available again.

In Thailand, the matter was a little bit more serious as the Mountain View company refused to remove the clips because they were not infringing its guidelines. It was forced to delete them after a period of unavailability, as the Thai authorities refused to re-enable the access to YouTube.