Less then a week after Twitter announced the censorship of Tweets in certain parts of the world search giant Google has announced a similar program targeted at the company’s blogger platform.
To reach the company’s new censorship goal GOogle will begin redirecting Blogger users to country-specific URLs for example instead of a Google.com blog in France the content would direct the users to Google.fr.
By adding country specific URLs Google can censor a blog post in one country but leave it untouched for example in the United States.
In a Blogger blog post titled Why does my blog redirect to a country-specific URL?” Google explains that the program is meant to limit censored content:
“Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you’re reading has been redirected to a country-code top level domain, or “ccTLD.” For example, if you’re in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au. A ccTLD, when it appears, corresponds with the country of the reader’s current location.”
To see non-affected pages users can go to Google.com/ncr (no country redirect) which will place a short term cookie in the users browser to prevent country based redirects while allowing a work around against censorship.
If you would like to see a non-affected page, you can direct to google.com/ncr (NCR stands for “no country redirect”), which places a short term cookie that temporarily prevents geographical redirection.
Google says they don’t want to violate local laws but still want to promote the Blogger platform in various countries, hence their decision.
