Censorship Of The World Wide Web - 1326 Words

We live in the age of information, a world that has now been largely digitalized. The World Wide Web is the central component of our era, as it allows people across the globe to share and receive information in an instance. It used to take months before a letter from China could reach the U.S, now it just takes a second with E-Mail. This fast pace information processing has allowed human society to move forward with unprecedented speed, but it also raises many concerns for government authorities. Sharing information is a powerful tool, and too much of it will make any government nervous. Censorship of information has had a long history throughout the world. In ancient China for example, censorship was considered a legitimate instrument†¦show more content†¦That is a 718% increase compared with the 757 items that Google had to remove in the six months prior (Suter). Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google wrote in her blog post, â€Å"It s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not typically associated with censorship.† Other countries can also send in requests to Google and ask them to take things down, but Google rarely complies with those requests. Being a U.S based company; Google has complied with 93% of the government requests from our own government authorities. It only complied or partially complied with only 24% of such requests from Canada, and 44% from France (Sutter). The numbers are significantly lower, which shows tha t Google is clearly under more pressure by the U.S government. Other nations like China and Russia have completely banned Google all together. These data suggests that the U.S government also actively monitors the World Wide Web, George Orwell’s worst nightmare. The U.S. government has even gone as far as to ask Google for data on its users more than 31,000 times in 2012 alone. Google said that they ended up turning over at least some data in every single case (Quain). However, some have argued that these monitoring isn’t all that bad. Censorship to some extent, as some would argue, is to