One in Four Countries Block Some Google Services

Google’s services are blocked or censored to some degree in one-fourth of the countries where it operates. China is the most polarising example, but it is not the only one. Google products — from search and Blogger to YouTube and Google Docs — have been blocked in 25 of the 100 countries where we offer our services, wrote Rachel Whetstone, Google’s vice president of global communications and public affairs, on the company’s European public policy blog. In addition, we regularly receive government requests to restrict or remove content from our properties, she wrote, adding that Google has argued to narrow the scope of such requests when it believes the request is overly broad