Google Rejects Australian Censorship Proposal

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Google baulks at Conroy's call to censor YouTube

Google says it will not "voluntarily" comply with the government's request that it censor YouTube videos in accordance with broad "refused classification" (RC) content rules.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google's censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally.

Google warns this would lead to the removal of many politically controversial, but harmless, YouTube clips.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt, one of Australia's top communications experts, said that to comply with Conroy's request Google "would have to install a filter along the lines of what they actually have in China".

As it prepares to introduce legislation within weeks forcing ISPs to block a blacklist of RC websites, the government says it is in talks with Google over blocking the same type of material from YouTube.

YouTube's rules already forbid certain videos that would be classified RC, such as sex, violence, bestiality and child pornography. But the RC classification extends further to more controversial content such as information on euthanasia, material about safer drug use and material on how to commit more minor crimes such as painting graffiti.

Google said all of these topics were featured in videos on YouTube and it refused to censor these voluntarily. It said exposing these topics to public debate was vital for democracy.

In an interview with the ABC's Hungry Beast, which aired last night, Conroy said applying ISP filters to high-traffic sites such as YouTube would slow down the internet, "so we're currently in discussions with Google about ... how we can work this through".

"What we're saying is, well in Australia, these are our laws and we'd like you to apply our laws," Conroy said.

"Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government."

Google Australia's head of policy, Iarla Flynn, said the company had a bias in favour of freedom of expression in everything it did and Conroy's comparisons between how Australia and China deal with access to information were not "helpful or relevant".

Google has recently threatened to pull out of China, partly due to continuing requests for it to censor material.

"YouTube has clear policies about what content is not allowed, for example hate speech and pornography, and we enforce these, but we can't give any assurances that we would voluntarily remove all Refused Classification content from YouTube," Flynn said.

"The scope of RC is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information. RC includes the grey realms of material instructing in any crime from [painting] graffiti to politically controversial crimes such as euthanasia, and exposing these topics to public debate is vital for democracy."

Asked for further comment, a Google Australia spokeswoman said that, while the company "won't comply voluntarily with the broad scope of all RC content", it would comply with the relevant laws in countries it operates in.

However, if Conroy includes new YouTube regulations in his internet filtering legislation, it is not clear if these would apply to Google since YouTube is hosted overseas.

"They [Google] don't control the access in Australia - all their equipment that would do this is hosted overseas ... and I would find it very hard to believe that the Australian government can in any way force an American company to follow Australian law in America," Landfeldt said.

"Quite frankly it would really not be workable ... every country in the world would come to Google and say this is what you need to do for our country. You would not be able to run the kind of services that Google provides if that would be the case."

This week the Computer Research and Education Association (CORE) put out a statement on behalf of all Australasian computer science lecturers and professors opposing the government's internet filtering policy.

They said the filters would only block a fraction of the unwanted material available on the internet, be inapplicable to many of the current methods of online content distribution and create a false sense of security for parents.

CORE said the blacklist could be used by current and future governments to restrict freedom of speech, while those determined to get around the filters and access nasty content could do so with ease.

Google baulks at Conroy's call to censor YouTube

[Wrathlon]

Our internet is fucked. I really don't see any light at the end of this tunnel. Pretty much he is going to get his own way, we will lose a lot of freedom and the zealot-like nature of his attitude towards the whole censorship thing means I can see Google pulling out of Australia or threatening to do so as well...that or google and all google related stuff being added to the blacklist.

[Psycho Penguin]

FFS someone kill Conroy already, he keeps fucking things up that didnt need his input in the first place. Yes, I hope you read this Conroy, go suck a dick fag.

[chad]

I kind of like Conroy.

Post: 1009

[OverDrive]

Re: Google Rejects Australian Censorship Proposal

Chad - endearing himself to the GU population for 1009 posts and counting...

[Milenko]

It is literally going to come to the point where someone is going to shoot Conroy in his own driveway.

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With their powers combined... ALIA join forces with Inspire Foundation, Google and Yahoo to battle Senator Conroy's internet filter - Security - Build - News - Atomic MPC

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Google: 'Net censorship amounts to undeclared trade war

Back in 2007, when one of the perennial Greek/Turk spats flared up again online, some hothead had a terrific idea: why not create a home video claiming that modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Ataturk, was gay?and that everyone else in Turkey is gay, too? The result was uploaded to YouTube. Similar videos followed. One might have hoped that such grade-school taunting would seem so ridiculous that it would simply be ignored. But here's how Google described what happened next:

"An individual public prosecutor in Ankara was able to block YouTube access for all Turkish users for over two years after YouTube rejected his demand that they remove a number of videos from the site globally because they were deemed to be breaching a Turkish law that protects the reputation of its founder Kemal Ataturk. An offer to restrict viewing for objectionable videos within Turkey was deemed inadequate by the Prosecutor?only the worldwide application of the Turkish law would have seen the ban reversed. Recently, the videos at the heart of the ban were automatically removed as the result of the copyright claim. These were reinstated (though restricted based on IP address for Turkey) when the claim was not upheld. As a result, YouTube is newly accessible from Turkey but the power to ban again in the same way remains until the law is clarified."

The block was removed two weeks ago, but Google's warning already looks prescient. A few days later, YouTube was blocked again over a political sex scandal video.

Internet censorship as trade barrier

Yes, it's censorship?but is it also a "trade barrier" under World Trade Organization rules? Google thinks so, and it wants government, especially the US and the Europeans, to act.

Google today put out a lengthy white paper (PDF) called ?Enabling trade in the era of information technologies: breaking down barriers to the free flow of information,? which argues that such Internet disruptions are ?tantamount to a customs official stopping all goods for a particular company at the border.?

Such blockages in the tubes aren't happening only in a few isolated outposts, either; Google claims that "more than 40 governments now engage in broad-scale restriction of online information."

Trade organizations have for some time been pushing the idea that Internet censorship is a trade barrier. This argument has two belated results. First, it gets tech companies off the hook for complying with government-mandated censorship. Remember the terrific drubbing that companies like Google and Yahoo took from Congress and others over their complicity with Chinese requests for e-mails and other information? Making the issue about trade barriers removes much of the responsibility from individual companies, who are just following national laws.

Second, this has the effect of shifting enforcement to governments, which Yahoo and Google have explicitly supported for years. In their view, companies are simply not equipped to pick and choose which national laws they will obey as they operate around the world. But having countries like the US hector China on Internet censorship issues in moral terms has not worked well and has generally led to Chinese charges of American hypocrisy. But now that China is a member of the WTO, making Internet censorship the trade dispute that can be judged by WTO rules gives other countries the necessary leverage to bring about change in Chinese policies.

?There is a growing consensus that governments must do more than appeal for the protection of human rights and encourage development of tools that allow users to bypass government firewalls,? says Google in its new paper. ?Censorship on the Internet poses a significant economic threat to companies seeking a level playing field as the established markets overseas.?

Such disputes aren't merely political, or related to dissidents. In many cases, especially in the huge Chinese market, business interests appear to lie behind much of the blocking. Google points out repeatedly how China's Great Firewall has been used to limit the appeal of its services, even as local ripoffs flourished and featured many of the same ?problems? that the Chinese government had with Google. The country also puts strict limits on foreign ownership.

And Chinese actions can be pretty non-subtle. For instance, in 2007, China was piqued at the US and altered its firewall so that "users who typed in Web addresses for the three major US-based Internet search engines (run by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!) were taken not to their site of choice but rather to the Chinese-owned search engine, Baidu."

The report is transparently self-serving, but that doesn't mean the issues raised aren't legitimate (and Google did belatedly take some action of its own earlier this year when it stopped preemptively censoring its Chinese site's search results). The US government has already intervened with the WTO over similar access issues in the analog world, most famously in a recent case against China's strict limits on the importation of Western films and media (which the US won).

Earlier this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signaled that she would go along with the tech companies' desire to make this a government-to-government issue. "New technologies do not take sides," she said in January. "But the United States does." She pledged that the US government would take a worldwide stand for a "single Internet" and would oppose the efforts of China, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia to impose censorship, detain bloggers, and block Internet businesses.

The European Parliament has already indicated some willingness to go along with the "trade barrier" concept, and EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes endorsed it on a recent trip to China.

Of course, playing by the WTO's rules cuts both ways. The US outlaws its own set of Internet businesses, including online gambling, and it was the subject of a WTO complaint from the island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, where many of these offshore gambling servers are located. Despite losing at the WTO for years on this issue, the US simply refuses to comply.