USA

Google commonly censors search results to comply with Digital Millennium Copyright Act-related legal complaints.^[2]

In 2002 Google was found to have censored websites that provided information critical of Scientology, in compliance with the United States' DMCA legislation.^[3][4] Google replaced the banned results with links to the DMCA complaint that caused the site to be removed. The DMCA complaint contains the site to be removed, and the organizations that requested the removal. The publicity stemming from this incident was the impetus for Google's making public of the DMCA notices on the Chilling Effects archive, which archives legal threats of all sorts made against Internet users and Internet sites.^[5]

[edit] United Kingdom

On 21 September 2006,^[6] it was reported that Google had 'delisted' Inquisition 21st Century, a website which claims to challenge moral authoritarian and sexually absolutist ideas in the United Kingdom. According to Inquisition 21 themselves, Google was acting "in support of a campaign by law enforcement agencies in the US and UK to suppress emerging information about their involvement in major malpractice", allegedly exposed by their own investigation of and legal action against those who carried out Operation Ore, a groundbreaking, far reaching and much criticized law enforcement campaign against the viewers of child pornography.^[7] Google released a press statement suggesting Inquisition 21 had attempted to manipulate search results.^[6]

[edit] Germany and France

On October 22, 2002, a study reported that approximately 113 Internet sites had been removed from the German and French versions of Google.^[8] This censorship mainly affected White Nationalist, Nazi, anti-semitic, radical Islamic websites and at least one fundamentalist Christian^[9] website, which is adamantly opposed to racism and anti-semitism^[10]. Under French and German law, hate speech and Holocaust denial are illegal. In the case of Germany, violent or sex-related sites such as YouPorn and BME that the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien

deems harmful to youth are also censored. Google complies with these laws by not including sites containing such material in its search results. However, Google lists the number of excluded results at the bottom of the result list and links to Chilling Effects for an explanation.^[1]