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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

It's really interesting to see this story presented this way and nobody here seems to have even bothered to try to find another perspective.

So, let's see the other side, i guess:

"We have nearly 1500 blocked sites in Portugal, where ~80% are piracy sites, 19ish% are gambling sites, and Uber (I know, right?). The full list is available at our site https://sitesbloqueados.pt/ and we are able to compile this list with info gathered by our fellow users, automatically."

from

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7swz4r/iama_developer...

(IE the developer themselves)

Yeah, a tool that's used for avoiding blocks on piracy and gambling, i'm shocked to find it was taken down!

Regardless of whether you agree, i think it's not uncommon or non-standard, and probably not (unlike some here seem to think) related to chinese censorship or other fun conspiracy theories.

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The irony of your stats is that what's on the blocked list is out of the extension developers' hands. The government decides what gets blocked and so is fully in control of the % of sites that are easy targets or hard to defend. If they really want to block a handful of political sites, the lesson here is make sure to include a bunch of other sites so that any attempts at unblocking are hard to defend. Finally, it seems part of the problem here is that the blocking orders come from something of a regulatory agency, without any due process or appeal possibility (except maybe after the fact). The existence of such a tool puts a lot of power in the hands of unaccountable government officials apparently in coordination with private industry.

> It's really interesting to see this story presented this way and nobody here seems to have even bothered to try to find another perspective.

It's really interesting to see people serve as the unpaid PR department of huge corporations who have paid someone to make this unilateral decision, but don't allow any of the tens of thousands of employees to offer an explanation.

The decision to pull the extension was made by someone (there's no algorithm to take the blame here). And a decision was made to ignore the thousands of users asking for an explanation. So, yeah, I don't really understand standing up and defending that company.

Wonder if a Googler could use their 20% gig to offer real support to real users. Probably a fireable offense.

I'd just like to correct one common misconception. It is not the government blocking sites, literally any company can just complain via email and the site is banned. No government oversight, no court order. Just being an important company.

To give you an example, one of the popular websites that was banned just showed photographs of the covers of the daily newspapers. This is 100% legal but some media group complained and that's about it.

From your comment it looks like it has everything to do with censorship: Google decided to help the government of Portugal with censorship by removing a popular censorship-circumvention extension.

In effect it's not exactly anti-information-prohibition (or pro-communication), but more in the line of anti-regulation. Which is a bit broader than simply anti-censorship.

That said, very likely the authors of the extension mainly target censorship, and consider anything else also becoming available as a nice side effect. (Or simply an acceptable trade off. Like the really dark porn and illegal business stuff with Tor.)

Wouldn't it be amazing if they block Google next? Sorry, you can't access Google without that one browser plugin that Google blocked.

An excuse for censorship doesn't mean it's not censorship.

No, it not being anything like the definition of censorship means it's not censorship.

None of the materials involved are banned or removed. They are simply only available legally, and not illegally. There isn't even any particular hardship in accessing them.

That's not censorship by any normal definition of censorship.

It would be if the materials themselves were no longer available.

What's the legal way to access the information on Uber's website?

Before you respond, I should say that Portugal has a law explicitly legitimating and regulating ride-sharing services, including Uber.

By that definition, China doesn't censor their Internet because tech savvy people can create tunnels to bypass the filters.

"Another perspective" apparently means describing the censorship in specific terms, in an attempt to distract from it being censorship?

Google either needs to regrow a spine, or deprecate the attractive nuisance that is a centralized app repository.

You seem to view anything that removes anything as censorship, which is pretty pure nonsense. It's only in your interestingly rewritten definitions of censorship that this is censorship.

IE censorship is defined by the OED as: "The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."

This is exactly none of those things. No book, film, news, etc is being prohibited. At all. The only thing being prohibited are illegal downloads of them. The book, film, news, etc it links to are still available legally!

webster is similar.

It would be censorship if the material those links went to was banned. But it isn't. The only ban is on accessing them without paying.

(Banning Gambling is also not censorship)

I'm also pointing out it's an incredibly clear webstore TOS violation. Like, the TOS literally prohibits this, and has forever.

So saying "we have no idea what happened" is instead a distraction.

I'm not sure what spine you expect them to regrow.

You also seem to not distinguish at all between government censorship (which this is not) and private actor censorship (which this is by your definition of censorship, but not by just about any dictionary).

So i'm not sure it's worth trying to have a meaningful discussion here.

Abstract "censorship" always has a concrete and more purposeful justification. And that justification is always aligned with the rules of the time, or said censorship could not have happened. So it's not particularly enlightening to follow the logic of that justification!

This obviously only could have occurred because it made sense in Google land. So yes, no meaningful discussion can happen with someone who insists on that paradigm, just like no meaningful discussion can occur with Google itself - it followed its rules, and therefore acted correctly.

Back to the big picture (and putting aside whether Portugal's block list is itself censorship). Here we've got a Free app which advocates breaking the law - essentially political speech analogous to a poster advocating ways of dodging the draft. And it has been made significantly harder to obtain, due to the deliberate choice of a powerful organization. Yes this does certainly sound like censorship to me!

Not that there's much legal remedy, or seemingly even a public-relations-based one any more. So really it's that for those of us who believe in the Internet (ie unfettered end to end communications), but perhaps have been giving Google a MITM-pass due to technological constraints, this is just another example for why we need to collectively wise up and get the fuck away from Google.

Google is the biggest copyright violator on the planet, it is a bit hypocritical of them to block some open source tool to achieve the same.

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