14 DAY TRIAL // In the recent period, the Mountain View company was kept in the spotlights because the European Commission criticized it for the privacy of its products. Following these complaints, Google started a powerful campaign to improve its image and debuted the Privacy Blog that is meant to keep the customers up-to-date with the latest efforts made by the company. Today, Andrew McLaughlin, Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs, talked about the censorship imposed by the Mountain View company that is sometimes regarded as a good or, other times, as a bad thing for the consumers.
As the Google employee sustains, the censorship of the content indexed by their technologies can be a positive aspect as long as it blocks access to child pornography or other type of material that infringes someone's copyright. "Some forms of censorship are entirely justifiable: the worldwide prohibitions on child pornography and copyright infringement, for example," he said.
However, the censorship might not be necessarily imposed by the Mountain View company, as the authorities have the possibility to block most of the Internet services accessible for free. This can be damaging especially for the parent company that loses traffic and money.
"Others, however, are overbroad and unwarranted. When a government blocks the entire YouTube service due to a handful of user-generated videos that violate local sensibilities -- despite our willingness to IP-block illegal videos from that country -- it affects us as a non-tariff trade barrier," he added.
The censorship matter was often the main subject at the Googleplex because the online video sharing service YouTube was entirely blocked in certain countries of the world. For example, it all started with Turkey that banned YouTube for insulting videos published on the official page. It continued with Thailand that blocked the Google service because the parent company refused to remove some videos that insulted the country's king.