What do Australia, Brazil India, Vietnam, the United States and Britain have in common? This week, Google named each of these nations among the list of countries that most often contact it with requests for content removal and user data. Google's disclosure is a bold step towards quantifying this trend. Whether it leads to greater protection of user privacy and free expression on the Internet will depend on the policies that guide the companies' responses to these government requests. But for now this move should prompt other companies to consider how to be more transparent about the censorship restrictions they face.
Google's decision to release this information reveals with greater granularity what internet service providers have been saying for years - that governments are increasingly demanding censorship of Internet content and information about users.
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