Tuesday, February 24, 2015

[censored]Who is your daddy? Google is![/censored]

For some reason Google feels they can censor whatever they like. Even though its Blogger service has lost dramatically to Wordpress, it has decided to alienate more users by banning sexually explicit content from next month on. No doubt this new censorship pleases David Cameron and it will be only a matter of time before that honorary knighthood comes Larry Page's way.


If you search you'll find that one third of all internet traffic is porn-related (1). When I was in college we studied the video standards wars. VHS won because they allowed porn, Video2000 and Beta-max did not. Sex sells. Google has no problem with censorship in foreign countries (2, 3), which makes the announcement to ban explicit sexual content - other than for artistic, educational, documentary, and scientific purposes, anyone knows what that is - all the more puzzling.

Once upon a time Google was the company that wanted to free all the information in the world but these days Google has turned itself into the moral police of the internet - or rather Judge Dredd: judge, jury and executioner. For many Google is the gateway to the internet and it has now decided to ban content that is perfectly legal. To add insult to injury it does so on the very same day the FCC plans to announce its decision on net neutrality, something Google supports.

I choose Blogger because I do not want to register an adult web address in my name but it looks like I have to find a new place to host my blog. Let me know if you have a suggestion where to host my blog.

(1) http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23030090
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
(4) http://indiatoday.intoday.in/technology/story/google-blogger-porn-ban-nude-images-moral-police/

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