What happens when Uncle Sam tells Google he doesn’t like your YouTube video?

Say you posted a YouTube video that members of the local, state or federal government don’t like. A law enforcement entity or government lawyer asks Google to take down your video. Do they? The answer is: not always. But the number of requests is going up.

For now, Google appears to have stood its ground more often than it has given in. It’s easy to imagine a dystopian future, however, in which actions like urinating on a passport or posting videos of police activities would be seen as subversive and grounds for a possible criminal investigation. And it’s also easy to imagine a future where governments would want to hide certain information from Google’s search engine results or censor the types of free political speech allowed online. From this perspective, the Google Transparency Report is a step in the right direction when it comes to holding the U.S. government responsible for its actions and alerting us to the ways that authorities foreign and domestic are attempting to bend the Internet to their own purposes.