YJL

Recently, I have noticed that Blogger’s blogspot.com has some ccTLD available for all blogs, which I don’t find pleased with it:

I don’t think it’s any geographical benefit, I try .com, .co.nz, and .co.uk, they all resolved with same IP address and alias for blogspot.l.google.com. So, it actually is for looking friendly for different region visitors in my first thought.

There is no downside from search engine aspect since you would have the following tag by default in your blog HTML source:

<link href='http://example.blogspot.com/' rel='canonical'/>

It won’t cause you trouble in between you and search engines as long as the tag is recognized, they know which URL is original source.

The real problem is this kind of ccTLD can make web statistics analysis less accurate in some way (for website being referred by this). Since there is no geographical benefit in referee’s side so far, you don’t really need to separate them. If you need visitor’s locations, that data is already recorded, I see no reason to distinct them by domain name. Unfortunately, there might not have easy way to modify domain in order to group them up into one entry.

There is an entry about this ccTLD (last updated on 3/20/2012 as of writing), it looks like Blogger is redirecting visitors to different ccTLD based on their geographical location because of local laws. This whole thing seems to be a workaround of dealing with laws:

Q: Why is this happening? A: We are doing this to provide more support for managing content locally. If we receive a removal request that violates local law, that content may no longer be available to readers on local domains where those laws apply. This update is in line with our approach to free expression and controversial content, which hasn’t changed.

It has no actual part for features. Just to make sure that they can remove content in respect to local laws. But that’s only effective based on ccTLD, which you can bypass it by adding /ncr/ at this moment, I believe, I don’t have a blocked content to test on. (using /ncr/ in URL to prevent redirection.) Furthermore, domain name doesn’t mean the origin of location, the resolved IP of three ccTLDs I tested above is located in US.

I may be wrong, but location of an IP (the server’s location) is where the local law you should comply, not the country noted by the domain name. So, ccTLD is just a workaround for Blogger. I use “workaround,” because it is not uniform, it only block on certain ccTLD because that’s only Blogger is asked to do. Think in this way, it speaks German when in Germany, Chinese in China, and so on. Blogger is doing the same as YouTube is doing, that is blocking content based on geographical location and the request of removal.

Imagine that if Blogger was accessible from China (not sure if it is now, it hasn’t been for years as far as I know), a blogspot.cn, you can bet on it that a lot of posts will be censored. For this case, it’s definitely a censorship and the servers do the censoring is on US soil. I believe this is not the case of what local laws Blogger is trying to comply.

I hope there are more from it in near future in speak of features, not just for the laws, like local servers, but I am not sure. For example, the interface language can change based on ccTLD server in the future, but that would make absolutely no sense, if the content is written in the language that visitor can’t read. Well, actually, Blogger has already done using your IP for top navigation bar if you are no logged in. Also an option to force or to redirect to only one specific ccTLD or original domain, such as .com, that will be nice.