After the recent announcement by Twitter that they would consider blocking tweets on a territorial basis in accordance with local laws, Google has followed suit with news that Blogger sites may be blocked on a country by country basis in the near future.
The ‘per country’ blocking has been made possible by changing the web address system of Blogger sites and will allow Google to remove access to a particular blog in certain countries. The result is that they can appease local legislation without removing worldwide access to content. For example is a UK blog infringes UK copyright law, it can be blocked within UK but remain visible in any other country where the content is legal.
In the coming weeks Blogger URLs will be redirected to a country coded top level domain although there will be an option to see any country’s version of a blog by adding “/ncr” (no country redirect) to the end of the URL. It is not clear whether this will work in territories where a request for removal has been made however.
The move can be seen as part of Google’s ongoing battle with blocking controversial content, specifically at the local level. Some argue that this is detrimental to freedom of speech although Google are insistent that this system “will limit their [content removals] impact to the smallest number of users.”
