Google Reports 'Alarming' Rise in Censorship by Governments

Rushe, Dominic. "Google Reports 'Alarming' Rise in Censorship by Governments." The Guardian, June 17, 2012.

From the article: "There has been an alarming rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor the internet in last six months, according to a report from Google.

Since the search engine last published its bi-annual transparency report, it said it had seen a troubling increase in requests to remove political content. Many of these requests came from western democracies not typically associated with censorship…. In a blog post, Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy analyst, wrote: "Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not." Read more

See also
Chou, Dorothy. "More Transparency Into Government Requests." Google Public Policy Blog, June 17, 2012.

 Google Transparency Report. Google.