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Comment by zalew | Hacker News Reader

> This is a hack around censorship laws in a few places (most relevantly to the instant case, Germany, I believe). Google has a blogspot.jp which is a copy of .com which is a copy of .de which is a copy of... except that they enforce country-specific censorship laws. This was deemed an acceptable tradeoff versus getting all of blogspot blacklisted in e.g. Germany.

what event/law are you referring to? why blogspot should be censored in germany?

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Germany has many laws which are different that e.g. the USA. In particular, in the US certain sentiments which are politically and socially radioactive are protected by the US Constitution and the laws, traditions, and expectations of the American polity. Germany is similar in some regards but there is one particular politically and socially radioactive statement you could make -- support for the Nazi Party -- which, owing to the laws, traditions, and expectations of the Germany polity, will result in the government coming down on you like a ton of bricks.

I know Germany and many other countries in Europe are more sensitive about promoting extreme viewpoints. My question was more about something specific related to censoring blogspot, and how the domain redirects are used to bypass that. I mean, how does it matter what domain is used to display the same content? OP says he's redirected to blogspot.jp - what problems does it solve for Google?

> * how does it matter what domain is used to display the same content?*

It only displays the same content if that content is compliant for the local region.

Thus, in the Nazi example, all off blogspot get the posts except blogspot.de, who filter it out somehow.

That's something that Youtube doesn't do with adverts very well - I'm in the UK, I've not left the UK, my IP geolocates to the UK, but I often get US ads in Youtube. Advertising law is different and often the ads are not compliant for the UK.

Presumably articles that need to be censored in Germany would be censored on blogspot.de and not on blogspot.com, so Germans are redirected.

All countries have different laws in this department, but moves to segment or restrict Internet content all kinda goes back to a French case against Yahoo a while back:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!

I have noticed this in referral logs. They do it for tons of countries (I would guess all based on how many I see). Does Google automatically remerge all that to treat it as one domain for pagerank (so links to those separate domains are just treated as if they linked to the .com page), duplicate content, etc.?

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