Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Moscow Leads the World in Calling on Google to Remove Content


Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 6 – The Russian powers that be not only are cracking down on the Internet at home but, in both admission of its international reach and an effort to affect it abroad as well, they were responsible for 75 percent of the requests to remove content from Google -- three times as many as all other countries combined.

            More than 11,000 of the 19,192 Russian demands that Google remove content involved “goods and services which fall under special laws” of the Russian Federation, the Transparency Report says (https://transparencyreport.google.com/government-removals/by-country/ and rbc.ru/technology_and_media/05/02/2019/5c5959789a79475f3d83d2bf?from=newsfeed).

                The number of such Russian demands increased by 36 percent compared to a year earlier. Most experts connect this increase with new Russian laws on anonymizers, but Russian officials are seeking to explain it away by saying that the figures now reflect only that Russia like other countries was beginning from a low base because the technology is new. 

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