Earlier this week, Google’s transparency report was published highlighting on how much the government saturates the Internet and basically shapes what people can and cannot find on dominant sites such as Facebook, Google and Twitter. In the report Google announced that there was another upswing in “removal requests” from multiple governments. Google is continuing to fight the government on these removals of certain sites while trying to maintain a relationship to where they can post regarding political events and not be penalized for it. This struggle with the requests shows how difficult it is to balance between having Internet freedom while upholding local laws and how this will continue to harm search sites such as Google. The government wants sites such as Google to restrict the public from viewing certain documents such as results from defamation lawsuits or visiting specific sites that they do not want them having access to. Amongst all of this chaos, Google as well as other tech sites are trying to find a “common ground” where the government can regulate them while maintaining the goal of a “free and open Internet”.
Google owns seventy-five percent of the Internet today, basically giving them nearly almost if not all the power to publish what they want, regulate what people can and cannot see and maintain the structure of freedom on the web. In my eyes, the government should only be regulating certain areas of the Internet that would put the people as well as themselves in any sort of danger or harm such as hackers, obscenity and sites such as “wikileaks” because those are the areas of the Internet that cause the most trouble more than anything else on the Worldwide Web. Google offers some sort of degree of transparency on how it censors and removes certain pieces of information at the governments’ request. However, the main thing that Google must do is to take a stand on how they should go about these removal requests, no matter where the information originated from, be it from the U.S. or other restricted areas. Google has continued to rise over the years since its initial launch and gradual takeover of the Internet, but in order to maintain the power and the credibility that they have been able to perserve, they have to be able to handle the removal requests that the government throws at them while remaining true to their audience who uses their site on a daily basis.
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