Over the past 10 years, Russia has become the leader in the number of content removal requests sent by Google.
Since 2011, the Russian authorities have sent more requests than all other countries combined, according to the corporation’s statistics.
In recent years, Google has been satisfying them more and more. Experts explain this by the fact that, thanks to the new laws on the regulation of the Russian Internet, the company has fewer and fewer opportunities to refuse government agencies.
Information about the number of requests from different countries’ corporations, as revealed by the Google Transparency Report, containing data from 2011 to 2020.
Over the years, Russian authorities have contacted Google 123,606 times (60.6% of all requests). In these requests, they asked to remove more than 950 thousand pieces of content from various services of the company – mainly web search and YouTube.
Until mid-2012, Russia was not even included in the TOP-15 countries in terms of the number of requests for data blocking. But a year later she entered the top seven, and in 2016 she came out on top. Since then, the gap with other states in terms of the number of requests has only grown.
Now requests from Russia come mainly from Roskomnadzor.
Since 2018, search engines must connect to the registry and delete the content entered there in automatic mode – this has already been done by Yandex and Mail.ru.
Google has been fined several times for refusing to do so and not filtering enough content. Whether he connected to the system is still unclear.
Many requests sent by Russia over the past 10 years cited a threat to national security as a reason for removing content – this is a third of their absolute number. But the number of such requests changed from year to year.
