Week in Review: July 29, 2015

Photo credit: Pixabay

Google Moderator Prepares for Shutdown

Google has announced that at the end of the month it will close its Moderator, a Web-based tool for soliciting and voting on questions. Google Moderator has been employed by several political figures, including the President of the Mexican Senate as well as President-Elect Obama's transition team, which used the tool in a series of public forums called "Open Questions." During these sessions, they answered questions posted and voted up on the Moderator website. Emil Protalinski of Venture Beat noted, "[This] first series ran for less than 48 hours and attracted 1 million votes from 20,000 people on 10,000 questions, while the second ran for just over a week and attracted 4.7 million votes from 100,000 people on 76,000 questions." Authors of a Penn State white paper, "7 Things You Need to Know about Google Moderator," remarked, "Google Moderator provides unique insight into an audience’s understanding by capturing the backchannel and allowing the audience to weight which questions, suggestions, or ideas are most interesting to them." Some on the Internet have speculated that Google's decision to shutdown the Moderator may be related to the rising - though controversial - popularity of Reddit.

Russia: Govt Internet Censors Accuse YouTube of Copyright Violations

The Russian Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications - also known as Roskomnadzor - has threatened [RUS] to block YouTube for copyright violations. YouTube has had a bumpy relationship with Roskomnadzor this year; in April, after unauthorized copies of two popular Russian TV series ("Chernobyl" and "Fizruk") emerged on the site, the Moscow city court ruled that the videos had to be removed. While YouTube quickly removed the content, Roskomnadzor now alleges that a total of 137 instances of copyright infringement remain online as of July 20. Tetyana Lokot of Global Voices translated Roskomnadzor's policy statement as follows, "After three business days, if the unlawful information is not removed, access to these URLs will be restricted by ISPs. This can mean that subscribers of some ISPs will have no access to the entirety of the YouTube service." Lokot, a PhD student at Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, added, " Roskomnadzor doesn’t usually warn sites when it adds them to the RuNet blacklist, but made an exception for YouTube in this particular case, seeing as the website is one of the world's most visited." For more information about Roskomnadzor, readers can turn to Internet Monitor’s November 2014 special report, “The Tightening Web of Russian Internet Regulation.”

Singapore