According to a "transparency report" released by Google, Western governments, including the United States, appear to be stepping up efforts to censor Internet search results and YouTube videos.
It was demanded that Google take down certain political videos, blog posts, and other content.
"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google, wrote in a blog post on Sunday night.
"For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn't comply with either of these requests."
According to the report, in the last half of 2011, U.S. agencies asked Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results, blog posts or archives of online videos, according to the report.
Overall, Google received 187 requests from United States law enforcement agencies and courts to remove content from its Web properties from July to December, up 103% from the 92 requests the Mountain View, California, company received in the previous reporting period.
The company only complied with at least 42% of the removal requests from the U.S. in the last half of 2011, the report says. Compared to previous reports, that number is down considerably. In the final half of 2010, for instance, Google stated it complied with 87% of U.S. requests to remove content.
Tech columnist Andy Greenberg, a writer for Forbes.com, says that Google "should be applauded for taking a strong stand against censorship" but that "the government's increasingly sticky fingers in Google's databases comes at a sensitive time."
"Google has been criticized for failing to reveal much about its reported partnership with the National Security Agency following a Chinese attack on its systems in 2010," Greenberg writes. "And the company has yet to take a stand on the House's recently-passed Cyber Infrastructure Security and Protection Act or its equivalents in the Senate, which are designed to give companies far more leeway to hand data over to government agencies for security purposes."
Google says it hopes the data will offer a "small window into what's happening on the Web at large."
