Doublespeak Comes to Blogger

Trey Smith

Ta-Wan alerted me to an interesting development. When he selects the bookmark to take him to ramblingtaoist.blogspot. com, he ends up instead at ramblingtaoist.blogspot.com.au. Why did the "au" (Australia) get added?

To be protect the freedom of expression, of course!

According to Techtree.com,

After the censoring of tweets by Twitter, it is now Google's turn to do the same with blogs via Blogger.com. It appears that Google has taken a cue from Twitter's censoring strategy in this regard. Users on the Google-owned blogging website will soon be redirected to URLs based on the country of their origin to make sure that they are governed by local jurisdictions and censorship policies. At the same time, it claims that the freedom of expression will not be suppressed.

Blogger.com has posted information regarding this new policy on its support page, which states:

"Over the coming weeks you might notice that the URL of a blog you're reading has been redirected to a Country-Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD). For example, if you're in Australia and viewing [blogname].blogspot.com, you might be redirected [blogname].blogspot.com.au".

It seems that Google is therefore, in a way, bowing down to internet censorship to avoid the hassles involved. Having said that, users still have the option of seeing a non-affected page by going to www.google.com/ncr, where NCR stands for No Country Redirect. This places a temporary short-term cookie to prevent geographical redirection.

You get that? In order to protect our right of free expression, a system is being set up to facilitate censorship on a country-by-country basis! In other words, your trusty scribes are free to write whatever we want here -- our freedom of expression -- but you may not have the freedom to read it!!

Welcome to our brave new world!