Speaking on Friday at the Google Big Tent, a free speech event in Washington, Schmidt said he is “worried” about a “balkanized” internet as governments try to chop up the web just as people in places like Burma are discovering it for the first time.

Schmidt also offered examples, drawn from his just-published book The New Digital Age, of how the internet is helping in some of the world’s most benighted places. He cited women in Pakistan with faces and eyes burned by acid, who could nonetheless have lives as “virtual people,” earning a living and connecting with the world online. He also described smuggling systems for micro SD cards in South Sudan to show how people will go to desperate lengths to get information.

Schmidt’s anecdotes come partly from his extensive tours of scary countries, which included a stop in North Korea that brought criticism from the State Department.

For Schmidt, his travels reinforced how sinister governments are casting a growing shadow over the mobile phone revolution.

“We’ll hear the distinct voices of the citizens of these countries that we haven’t heard before,” he said. “These people are just like us but their governments are not like ours.”

The situation creates moral dilemmas for companies that make technology that connect people but that can also be co-opted as tools for oppression. As Google’s head lawyer, David Drummond, explained at the outset of the event, the most important battles over free speech have shifted from books and newspapers to technology. Drummond warned that bad governments are now turning to the United Nations and international treaties in an effort to exercise control over the world’s telecommunications infrastructure.

The event, which was hosted by Google and Bloomberg and included media executives discussing Chinese censorship, took place a day after the company’s latest update to its Transparency Report on global censorship.

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Last summer, the news organizations published stories that described the billions in wealth held by the family of the Chinese premier. In response, China shut down the Times’ Mandarin news service, blocked its English website and denied visas to journalists. The government also blocked Bloomberg‘s consumer-facing websites, bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek – a block that remains in place today.

Speaking at the Google Big Tent event in Washington on Friday, Bloomberg’s Chief Content Officer, Norman Pearlstine, explained the decision to publish.”We would lose our credibility [if we didn't],” said Pearlstine. He added that, in China, “information is perceived as belonging to the state” and said he doesn’t anticipate this view changing in the near future.

Bill Keller, a former editor-in-chief and current columnist for the New York Times, echoed Pearlstine’s views that news publishers can’t rationalize censorship by saying they would lose money and influence in China. ”They can make life miserable for you,” Keller said of the Chinese government, adding that “this will cost money.”

There may, however, be a bright side to being shut out of China. According to Keller, many Chinese are aware that the Times and Bloomberg deliberately took a financial hit to preserve their brands — and in the long run, this will earn them loyalty and trust.

Keller and Pearlstine spoke on a panel with media executive Mark Whitaker and Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, at a Google “Big Tent” event about security and free speech in the digital age.

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In the second half of 2012, the number of government requests to remove content from services like YouTube and Blogger increased from 1,811 to 2,285, and the number of items targeted for censorship increased from 18,070 to 24,179. As this screenshot shows, government requests have been rising steadily for years:

Many of these requests appear to have come from politicians who invoke defamation laws to remove content that was damaging or embarrassing. In a section of the report that breaks down requests by country, Google notes it received a request to remove a YouTube video that allegedly showed the President of Argentina “in a compromising position.” (Google did not comply with the request but did impose age restrictions on the video.)

Google also noted a spike in requests from Brazil where electoral law permits candidates to ban “offensive” material, and from Russia where a controversial law allows the government to remove content it seems harmful to young people. The company also received requests from multiple countries to censor the “Innocence of Muslims” video.

The content censorship report is part of Google’s ongoing effort to shed light on how governments seek to access its data and suppress content. In the last year, the company has begin issuing the report in two parts — one devoted to content takedown and another dedicated to requests to identify users. Under the content section, Google also shows copyright takedown requests from private companies.

Twitter has recently followed Google’s example by creating transparency reports of its own. Other prominent social media and content providers, including Facebook, have remained largely silent on the issue.

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The card in question, from a company called SmellYourMum (SYM), read, “You’re a c*nt. Sorry, I meant to say ‘Merry Christmas,’” although without the asterisk I inserted (this is a family website, after all). This was shown in an image, with the text alongside it including the aforementioned asterisk.

SYM claimed the ad wasn’t offensive because of “the specific context of it appearing on a humorous card intended for close friends or family.” Amazon chimed in saying the card was “meant as a bit of light-hearted, irreverent fun,” but also went a step further, arguing that the ad in question wasn’t an ad at all, but a product listing.

Nonetheless, the ASA said it qualified as an ad and therefore fell under its remit. It said the use of the c-word was “so likely to offend that it should not be used at all in marketing communications even when it was relevant to the name of the product.”

Interestingly, part of the problem here is that Amazon doesn’t have an adults-only category for products carried on its site. SYM also noted that Amazon didn’t provide a way for it to censor the image, which showed the asterisk-free version of the card’s message (that said, the ASA said even the asterisked version was too offensive).

There are many products in Amazon’s UK store that would probably fall foul of the precedent here. So the question is, is this just excessive censorship, or does the regulator have a point here?

If a physical shop carried a poster for such a card in its window, there is little doubt that people would complain. And although the ASA said the offensive word should not even be used in marketing communications, I suspect that the card’s listing in a printed catalog would not have elicited such a complaint to the advertising regulator in the first place.

The ruling leaves Amazon in a difficult position, due to the breadth of third-party products carried in its store. It doesn’t help that the ruling also comes in the same month in which Amazon U.S. was found to be advertising algorithmically-generated but nonetheless appalling “Keep calm and rape a lot” T-shirts. If there’s much more of this kind of pressure, Amazon may have to be a bit more proactive about screening the products it carries, or at least adjust the way in which it advertises them.

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The Hacker News itempointed readers to DNS lookup information posted early Monday that the popular project hosting and code sharing site was unavailable to users in Beijing, Shenzen and other Chinese localities.

Poor Chinese Developers, #GitHub is blocked in China! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5090700—
Vianney Lecroart (@acemtp) January 21, 2013

Update: According to a newer post on the HN thread:

“I believe the blocking is directly related to an automated train ticket polling plugin that had brought down Github just days ago. Due to upcoming Chinese New Year, newly released train tickets are sold within minutes. That plugin introduces huge traffic to already crumbling ticket vending site, and it has obviously made railroad bureau angry. Blocking Github makes that plugin immediately malfunction because it makes reference to javascript files hosted on Github pages. The bureau has also paid a visit to the plugin’s author, for the purpose of intimidation perhaps.”

San Francisco-based Github is the most popular project hosting and code sharing site — last week it said it passed the 3-million user mark. It is not alone when it comes to companies that run afoul of Chinese censorship. YouTube, Facebook and news sites have been blocked, and last year Chinese users were unable to download a new version of Node.js because its version number was the same number as the date of the Tiananmen Square uprising.

As many on Twitter commented this morning and as GigaOM has reported before, these roadblocks not only hinder the flow of news and information for citizens, they hurt the ability of Chinese developers to compete — and in this case collaborate — on a global basis.

This story was updated at 07:55 a.m. PT with new information from the Hacker News post 

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user matt512

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CNET was ready to give the Hopper with Sling DVR, a set-top box from Dish Network, a spot in the finals of its “Best in CES” awards at the Consumer Electronics Show — until a directive came through from the site’s corporate parent CBS that the Hopper couldn’t win the award, because CBS is suing the company over its AutoHop commercial-skipping feature.

Not only was the Hopper disqualified from the award, but CNET added an editor’s note to its review of the device saying it would no longer be reviewing any products that were the subject of litigation with its parent company — a list that would include both the Hopper and Aereo, the over-the-net video broadcasting startup backed by Barry Diller, which CBS is also suing.

As John Hermann of BuzzFeed noted, this is probably every tech journalist’s nightmare: being told by a corporate parent that they can’t do their jobs because the parent co. is involved in a a lawsuit. But it’s more than just a journalist’s nightmare — it could be a serious problem for CNET when it comes to maintaining the trust of their readers. The site noted that the restrictions only affects its reviews and not its news reporting, but will readers make that distinction?

Presumably, when someone goes to the CNET site looking for information about set-top boxes or video-streaming hardware, they want the most complete information they can find. If they know that certain products aren’t going to be reviewed because CBS doesn’t like them for some reason, that’s going to color their impressions of the site’s thoroughness in doing its reviews — and it might also make them wonder about what else is being left out.

The more cynical might wonder whether anyone will even notice once the CES decision blows over, but for media entities — even large ones — in times like these, the trust of their readers is more valuable than ever, and it should probably not be squandered lightly.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hans Gerwitz

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As my GigaOM colleague Bobbie Johnson pointed out in a recent post, the French government has been making some strong — and controversial — statements about what it wants the company to do after an outbreak of homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic comments erupted on Twitter. The minister for women’s rights, Najat Belkacem-Vallaud, wrote in a newspaper opinion piece that the government believes the service must “respect the values of the Republic” and take action to stop or censor hate speech. She said French authorities will be discussing how to do this with Twitter, and added (translation by Google):

“Even before the work is started, it should already be possible to act to remove tweets that are clearly illegal and, at the very least, make access impossible, so that the damage already done [to homosexuals, etc.] do not persist or do not cause additional problems with young people attracted by the publicity given to this unfortunate story.”

Many governments want to use Twitter to control speech

Since French laws make hate speech illegal (as similar laws do in a number of other countries, including Canada), the minister is really just asking Twitter to do the same thing the German government did: that is, to censor speech that contravenes the laws of the country. In the case of Germany, it was tweets by a neo-Nazi group, since expressing Nazi ideologies is illegal there. Twitter explained at the time that it had no choice but to obey the laws of the countries it does business in, but that it would try to limit the impact on free speech by only blocking access to those tweets for residents of Germany — as permitted by the regional-censorship tools it announced about a year ago.

Although they haven’t gone as far as France or Germany, officials in Britain have also broached the idea of trying to restrict Twitter speech — and for what they say are similarly virtuous purposes: after the riots in London last year, the government argued that much of the violence was driven by social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry instant messaging. The authorities held discussions with most of the major players about how (or whether) they should regulate such conduct, but in the end no action was taken. Twitter has also been involved in some of that country’s infamous “super-injunction” cases, where even the mention of an injunction is considered illegal.

In some ways, the German example was the most clear-cut case Twitter could possibly have wanted: it referred to specific speech — expressing Nazi ideology — that is illegal, and is relatively easy to nail down. But this ability opens a vast can of worms for a company whose CEO and general counsel have both repeatedly referred to it as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

In Turkey, for example, it’s illegal to say or do anything that is seen as insulting to Turkishness — a law that the government has used to block YouTube videos, among other things. What if Turkey was to ask Twitter to block or ban tweets or accounts that engaged in anti-Turkish behavior? A similar kind of question came up during the recent hostilities between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, when both sides used Twitter to hurl threats at each other. What if Israel asked Twitter to ban or block Hamas accounts or tweets sympathetic to this illegal organization? What if Egypt had asked for censorship during the Arab Spring?

What qualifies as hate speech on Twitter?

The racist and homophobic tweets targeted by the French government are an even slipperier slope: even if hate speech is against the law, what 140-character messages would fall into that category? Would simply using a hashtag like #SiMonFilsEstGay (If my son was gay) or #UnBonJuif (A good Jew) qualify? If Twitter was supposed to be removing or blocking access to specific tweets, how would it determine which were genuinely hate speech? Would it have a list of banned words, or run some kind of sentiment algorithm filter on the entire stream?

In a very real sense, what the French government seems to want Twitter to do — or wants to help it do — is virtually impossible. Twitter sees almost half a billion tweets every day, and has difficulty even providing a search function that works over a longer period than about a week. How could it (or anyone else) manage to filter through those millions of tweets to remove or block access to ones that expressed specific thoughts or opinions? And even if it could, would that be the right thing to do? Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian makes a persuasive argument that it would not, although others have argued that France should renounce the “free-speech fetish” of the U.S.

As it becomes an increasingly global media entity, however — and one that controls its own platform, unlike the declining media giants of the past — this is an issue Twitter is going to have to confront head on. And how it handles these kinds of censorship demands will say a lot about how much trust we can have in this digital free-speech machine.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazzi and Shutterstock/Jirsak

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On Friday the bestselling author Tim Ferriss, whose book The Four-Hour Chef will be published by Amazon’s New York imprint on November 20, entered into a marketing promotion with BitTorrent. A BitTorrent blog post proudly proclaims: “It’s poised to be the most banned book in U.S. history. The 4-Hour Chef is one of the first titles underneath Amazon’s new publishing imprint; boycotted by U.S. booksellers, including Barnes & Noble.” The same “banned book” point is repeated in the materials sent to press, which include the following “points to consider”: “It’s a significant marketing partnership, particularly in light of the ban of the book by Barnes & Noble and others.” And “Similar promotions for recording artists generated downloads in the tens of millions amongst BitTorrent users, offering a significant lift in awareness and sales.”

So is Barnes & Noble banning The Four-Hour Chef because of its controversial content? Not so much. Ferriss’s book is simply one of several that Barnes & Noble will not stock in its stores because it is published by Amazon. As Barnes & Noble announced earlier this year, “Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain ebooks to our customers. Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content.” Other booksellers, too — both chains like Books-A-Million and small independent stores — do not stock Amazon titles because, as Books Inc. owner Michael Tucker recently put it to the New York Times, “At a certain point you have to decide how far you want to nail your own coffin shut.” Tim Ferriss himself told me last week, “Do I blame [Barnes & Noble]? No. If I were in their shoes, would I do the same thing? Maybe.” Update: Ferriss responded to my concerns about the promotion in an email:

I view things through a different lens. I think the implications of this boycott or ban — choose the word you prefer — are larger then people realize. If this book fails due to a retail stonewall, I can tell you for a fact that more than a dozen A-list authors I know will hit pause on plans for publishing innovation for the next few years. Is The 4-Hour Chef the same as Huckleberry Finn?  Of course not, and I never implied that it was. But do I view stifling innovation and free speech (through distribution of otherwise) as a malevolent thing? Yes. Regardless of the motive (moral, economic, etc.), the outcome is the same: regress instead of progress. And regress snowballs quickly. At the end of the day, I want people to think about boycotting and banning, both historically and moving forward. The fact that you wrote a piece about precisely that — raising awareness and stimulating conversation — is a great thing. That public discourse is one of my goals. Last, I’d be remiss not to point out: booksellers use banned books as a marketing gimmick every year as a matter of course. Yes, I’m using the media to highlight what I view as a serious fork in the road for content creators. But if anyone is guilty of using “banned books” as a gimmick, it’s booksellers themselves.

Readers can still order Amazon titles from Barnes & Noble’s website and most independent bookstores will order them if readers ask. Barnes & Noble’s policy is a business decision — just the way Amazon’s marketing campaign last December, which gave shoppers a discount if they walked into bricks-and-mortar stores and scanned products with the Amazon Price Check app, was a business decision. (Neither Amazon nor Barnes & Noble responded to a request for comment for this piece.)

“Disruptive voices should be heard,” BitTorrent proclaims. (Conveniently, according to today’s issue of Fortune, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is this year’s “ultimate disruptor.”) And “we’ll be asking users to support Tim and the Amazon imprint.”

“Where books are burned, in the end people will burn”: That line, from the German nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, is engraved on a plaque at Berlin’s Bebelplatz, the site where the Nazis burned thousands of books in 1933. The disruptors who do speak out for Ferriss won’t be risking personal harm. They won’t be standing up against free speech. Ferriss approached Amazon for a book deal and in four days, it will be published. That’s not exactly censorship.

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What it shows is that censorship varies greatly across the world — some of which stretches the definition of what people usually define as censorship. For example, since the reports began in 2010, the United Kingdom has led the way with 97,891 removal requests, 96,280 of which were for Google’s AdWords.

But the majority of the U.K.’s removal requests occurred in 2010 at the behest of the U.K. Office of Fair trading, which asked for “the removal of fraudulent ads that linked to scams,” according to  the July-December 2010 report. Google removed nearly all of them, more than 93,000 items.

Other nations engage in a much more traditional — at least in a Western sense — censorship. Thailand, for example, has far fewer government removal requests (431), all of which are directed at YouTube for criticizing Thailand’s king. The latest numbers show in the last six months Turkey and the United States have led the world in data removal requests.

What’s perhaps most interesting about the data are the reasons Google was asked to take down content. They provide insight into a government’s priorities and rationale. While Brazil and Hong Kong are diligent about copyright requests, they are so for different reasons: Brazil had 11,613 removal requests directed at Picasa Web Albums, Hong Kong directed its 381 at YouTube. Countries across the world cited pornography as a reason for removal, with Turkey as the most aggressive (557).

And while defamation was the leading worldwide excuse for removal requests, the products that caused the defamation varied greatly, from Web Search to Blogger to AdWords. Take a look at each country to see its frequency and reasoning for petitioning Google.

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The news comes by way of a company blog post announcing Google’s sixth “Transparency Report,” an ongoing look at how governments around the world ask for information about Google subscribers or ask the company to remove content. And, once again, the report provides colorful details about requests from different countries — including, this time, fake court orders submitted in the U.S. and Canada.

Turning to the requests themselves, Google reports that in the first half of 2012, governments made 20,938 requests for information about 34,614 accounts — which include Google products like Gmail, YouTube and Blogger. This is approximately a 15 percent increase from the last six months of 2011. In the longer term, here’s what the trend looks like:

The countries with the greatest increase in government requests for information included South Korea (257 to 423: 65%), Poland (241 to 351: 46%) and the United States (6,321 to 7,969: 26%). Turkey and Western European countries saw large increases in government requests to remove content. In these cases, the requests related to images of criminal content but also included government officials abusing privacy or defamation to remove embarrassing blogs or videos.

Governments’ growing interest in Google users can be explained in part by the fact that more people are online, but the numbers suggest the pace of surveillance is growing faster than the rate of connectivity. Also take note that while many of these requests relate to legitimate court orders or police investigations, others are illegitimate and Google does not comply with all the requests. In the last report, for instance, the company refused to give the government of Canada the identity of a YouTube subscriber who peed on his passport and flushed it down the toilet.

This time, Google said it refused to honor some requests on the ground they were based on faked court orders. One of these came from a U.S. woman invoking copyright to target blog posts and three were supposed defamation court cases from India.

Overall, the report tells a familiar and somewhat depressing tale of governments’ efforts to burrow deeper into our online lives. But there is also positive news in the fact that more companies are following Google’s lead and shining a spotlight on these activities. As Google notes, companies like Dropbox, LinkedIn, Sonic.net and Twitter have begun to share their statistics too.

These acts of transparency among tech companies will ideally create a virtuous cycle where other companies feel obliged to begin providing censorship data too (Facebook? Hello, Facebook, are you out there?).

Another positive development in the new report is bar graphs that make it easier to see takedowns over time:

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