"It's too bad that FR 'Moderators' demand that articles this important be posted to 'Bloggers' in order, apparently, that fewer people read it. Rather like Google's doing the evil Obama's wishes to squelch anti-administration content."
Perhaps the reason for relegating articles of this type to Bloggers has more to do with making sure that the News remains News.
A quick perusal of the original story from The Register reveals that contrary to the inference of the blog post from DC Clothesline, the bulk of the offending removal requests come from Turkey and Russia, rather than the US as is inferred by the author.
While US statistics are correctly cited, please note that a large part of them are copyright infringement cases while the requests for the benefit of public officials were from the countries mentioned earlier, plus the UK.
Maybe when this type of sloppy (if not disingenuous) "reporting" is cleaned up, the alternative media blogs will earn the kind of respect that so many seem willing to give them without due diligence.
It's a good point, although given Google's willingness to bend over forward for any government's requests (witness their active collusion with China to suppress liberty there) I don't we should have any illusions about this, nor I think, should we suppose that the handful of examples cited really illustrate the extent of the problem.
Good trade craft, in fact, would require Google to leak some more or less innocent examples along with Google's "concerns" in collusion with spy agencies so that the full extent of this censorship is not perceived.
A far bigger problem -- which has always been the problem with mass media -- is the conspiracy of silence, in which Google does indeed participate. Google's top results and search algorithms are skewed to weigh heavily to the Left. Anyone who doesn't believe this should have followed the recent pajamaboy fiasco, or Phil Robertson's problems. Search results from Google slanted heavily toward websites expressing the leftist point of view in the opening hours of those scandals, and it has only been in the last day or so that the overwhelming number of postings mocking pajamaboy has finally driven the engines algorithms to accept the reality that in cyberspace -- on this issue at least -- the leftist view does not prevail.
Google of course, will never reveal the extent to which it is a fellow traveller with any left leaning government, and suppresses news favorable to the right.