Censorship sucks redux

Last week I wrote about government attempts to censor the Net. Now Google has released data that reveals how many requests it received from government agencies to remove content and from which countries. You can find the stats here.

The data covers government requests made between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009. The largest number of requests came from Brazil, followed by Germany and India. The Guardian has done a mashup of the data that shows the number of requests per million Internet users in each country. With an online population of just 5.8%, Armenia made the most removal requests.

Bear in mind that the requests cover removal of information from both Google and YouTube, which is owned by Google. While it’s easy to ascribe nefarious motives to unnamed government agencies, in the case of YouTube, removal of video content could be due to something as innocuous as a copyright violation. One explanation for Brazil topping the list is the popularity of Google’s social networking site, Orkut, in that country.

More disturbing are government requests about users of Google services. Brazil leads the pack, closely followed by the U.S.  Just what do governments want to know, about who and why? Google hasn’t released the juicy details–yet.