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Will Google and Youtube Cave to a Request by Dubai Police to Censor Search Terms?

The Doha Centre for Media Freedom, a Qatar-based non-governmental organisation, on Sunday called on the popular internet search engine company Google to reject a request from Dubai Police to ban approximately 500 terms.

A representative from Dubai Police confirmed the request for a ban. The list of key words included pornographic and anti-religious terms and was discussed in conjunction with the widely reported request for a similar ban on items on the user-generated video site YouTube, according to police media executive Ashur Musa.

Dr. Mohammad Mourad, the director of decision making at Dubai Police, said the list, originally compiled by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, has not been finalised. Dubai Police will meet with representatives from YouTube, owned by Google, in two weeks to discuss the potential YouTube ban.

While the list of search terms has not yet been implemented, Mourad described the representatives from Google as “very cooperative.” Google could not be reached for comment.

Google has agreed to government requests for internet monitoring before, most notably in China. As a precondition for tapping into the country’s market, the company agreed to scrub certain websites from search results, essentially presenting users with a sanitized version of the internet.

While the UAE authorities have said that the potentially banned terms are related to security and pornography topics, the Doha Centre was unable to obtain a copy of the list from either the police or Google.

According to the Doha Centre, the UAE authorities said they sought to “maintain religious harmony and prevent any infringements of religious and ethnic integrity in the light of local culture and traditions”.

Xavier Rinaldi, a journalist at the centre, said the strategy will prove ineffective in the long run. “If you don’t have choice, you don’t have harmony. You create, you maintain and you perpetuate frustration. Blocking or censoring leads to frustration.”…SOURCE

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