It seemed like an innocuous enough change — from this week, all visitors from India to blogs hosted on Google's Blogger saw the URLs read [blogname].blogspot.in rather than the .blogspot.com they were used to.
Besides, while your mum reading your latest musings would see the post with the URL ending with .in, an aunt in Australia would read the same post with .au. Google now redirects individual blogs to ‘country-code Top Level Domains' (or ccTLD), such as .in for India or .au for Australia.
The move, which means that the same content is seen across multiple domains, has raised concerns about censorship, Internet ownership, as well as questions about the effect on search ranking and search engine optimisation (SEO).
SEO concerns
According to those who work with SEO here, search engines traditionally penalise sites with extensive “duplicate” content.
In an entry in its help and support FAQs dated January 9, Google addressed SEO concerns. While admitting that the change would have some implications on search ranking, the Internet giant claimed it was “making every effort to minimise any negative consequences of hosting Blogspot content on multiple domains”. Crawlers would index the main .com site only, it said.
However, it is unclear about how analytics, Facebook ‘likes' and other stat counters, some of which are domain specific, will change with the redirects.
The change does not affect custom domains.
Internet boundaries
According to Google, the move is mainly to enable it to selectively block content in a particular country, in accordance with country-specific laws, while allowing it to be available to other users around the world.
“Migrating to localised domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law,” it said.
This is similar to what Twitter announced on January 26 on its official blog, when it gave itself “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country, while keeping it available to the rest of the world”.
Media commentators say the decisions strike against one of the earliest notions of the Internet — that it works without the constraints of nationality — and attempt to govern the Web by local laws.
“The rhetoric is that the Internet is global, but we've been seeing [governments say] how this information has to be regulated,” says Nishant Shah, director-research at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).
He sees the decisions as “symptomatic of a much larger change”, at a time when questions of whether governments or companies should regulate the Internet are raised. “We are examining who creates, controls and disseminates information.”
The offer to enable “country-specific censorship” comes at a time when Internet companies operating in India are locked in a legal battle with the centre over dealing with problematic material online, and the Government's demand that the companies regulate/filter content before it is published.
Accountability
However, while the Internet companies may seem willing to follow the law of the land, questions have been raised about how transparent the process will be, especially in protecting the rights of users, in the face of government pressure.
Twitter insists that it will act only on “what we believe to be a valid and applicable legal request”.
“Filtering is neither desirable nor realistic,” the company has said, and promises to notify users of any requests to censor.
The notices will also be displayed on Chilling Effects (chillingeffects.org), a collaboration among law school clinics and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that helps users understand their rights and deal with legal threats to online activity.
Google already reports legal notices it receives for contentious blogs and content to Chilling Effects.
Significantly, a study by the CIS last year suggested that online intermediaries tended to err on the side of caution when faced with take down requests under the Information Technology (Intermediaries guidelines) Rules, 2011.
Both Twitter and Google have pointed out workarounds for the country-specific censorship.
Google search and Facebook already have technology to selectively prevent people from seeing items deemed illegal in a country.
