Google Redirects Traffic To Avoid Kazakh Demands

pbahra writes "Google has rejected attempts by the Kazakh government 'to create borders on the web' and has refused a demand to house servers in the country after an official decree that all Internet domains ending with the domain suffix for Kazakhstan be domestically based. Bill Coughran, Google senior vice president said in his blog that from now on, Google will redirect users that visit google.kz to google.com in Kazakh: 'We find ourselves in a difficult situation: creating borders on the web raises important questions for us not only about network efficiency but also about user privacy and free expression. If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we would be helping to create a fractured Internet.' Mr. Coughran said that unfortunately, it would mean that Kazakh users would have a poorer experience as results would no longer be customized for the former Soviet republic."

What?

[igreaterthanu]

unfortunately, it would mean that Kazakh users would have a poorer experience as results would no longer be customized for the former Soviet republic

What is wrong with simply using something along the lines of http://www.google.com/kz/ [google.com] to customize results?

Here are the actual reasons...

[bogaboga]

'We find ourselves in a difficult situation: "..." "If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we would be helping to create a fractured Internet.' "...".

The more plausible reason follows, thus: -

"We find ourselves in a difficult situation: If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we will be backing ourselves into a corner where we could find ourselves subject to the whims of governments good and bad. Not a good move under any measure at all. We could enable governments confiscate our equipment and be subject to more blackmail.

Further, our yielding to such [outrageous] demands could mark the beginning of a torrent of similar requests from governments around the globe, disrupting our current efficient setup, which we modify/tweak without asking for any government approval.

All in all, Google will not succumb to any action and will oppose any efforts from within or without that seek to undermine the value of our shareholders.

Will Google lose its google.kz domain?

[tomer]

If they won't fill the government demand to host google.kz inside Kazakhstan, will they lose the their google.kz domain? Because it might worth few bucks to typically host the site in a server farm located in Kazakhstan and than redirect everyone to the international site. This way, they won't lose their domain and will fill the government demands.

Re:Isn't the internet (and google) already fractur

[jrumney]

Even worse is the growing trend to assume you want Spanish language pages because your IP address is geolocated in Spain, completely disregarding the Accept-Language HTTP header. Google and Facebook are both abusing their geolocation technology in this way, and probably others as well. Just because you have the technology to do something, doesn't make it a good idea, especially when there is an already existing method of dealing with language preference which is under control of the users. Google fanboys will pop up now and say that the unwashed masses don't know how to configure their browsers, so Google is doing them a favour, but the reality is that browsers on PCs sold to the unwashed masses in Spain will default to Spanish, so the existing standards based method is at least no worse than the geolocation assumption in predicting what language the user might want, and much easier to work around especially if you want to access those services anonymously.

Re:What?

[cshark]

What I'm not understanding about the original statement is why Google needs the .kz domain when they can do a Geoip and figure out where in the world you are the minute you hit Google.com. It just seems kind of silly that the domain would be necessary in the first place, for a company that continually hires the best and brightest engineers in the world. You can't tell me that I'm smarter than the entire team at Google. Simply not possible. But if it is, I'll be happy to accept a job there, and show them how to do it.

Re:Isn't the internet (and google) already fractur

[shutdown -p now]

GP's point was that we already have a well-defined way for browsers to specify the desired language - Accept-Language HTTP request header. This is usually easily configured by the user - e.g. in IE it's in Options->Languages. Furthermore, most browsers (at least IE and Chrome here) are automatically using the OS locale to provide a meaningful default. If I'm in Spain, but I'm running Windows with US English locale, then chances are good that I want my searches to be in English, not Spanish.