Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.