Google recently created a page where they revealed government take-down requests for their services, with some interesting figures revealing Brazil topping the list of take-down requests, followed by Germany, India and the United States.
Australia ranks 10th with 17 take-down requests, of which Google has complied with 52%. China however considers the take-down requests themselves state secrets and so Google cannot reveal that data without legal trouble.
While this is all well and good in Google’s campaign for internet openness and freedoms, what this ultimately makes me even more curious about is the corporate take-down requests they get – where are the stats for those requests, Google?
While it’s easier to target countries and represent their statistics on a map nicely, I suspect corporate entities are responsible for the majority of the take-down requests, particularly for YouTube.
What would be most interesting is if the implications of law means that the corporates effectively act the same way as China, with the take-downs being treated as commercial-in-confidence.
It would also dovetail very nicely with the idea that China is effectively acting as a giant corporation, and as a result just getting stuff done instead of the bickering we see in open democracies.