While I understand why you pointed out data requests are different because it's mentioned in the last paragraph of the article, I should have made clear that I was not referring to them but to censorship requests in general which made me aware of this practise so I looked it up. I picked on the US government because I feel they should be among those setting a good example for minimal censorship in general.
Of course I understand that full disclosure of the censored information would defeat its purpose, but a list of each domain and a specific reason for each being blocked from search results on google would at least show there's some transparency for those wanting to be informed of what their government is doing with such a sensitive subject. There's nothing preventing these from being lies but otherwise there is no possibility of information being shared with the public.
Maybe I don't understand DNS well enough, but the majority of the internet's DNS and IP allocation happens in the U.S. Instead of approaching google, why not simply revoke/seize/redirect the DNS/IP's of offending sites so one cannot still access them outside google? I would hope all of these sites are removed for good reasons such as illegal forms of pornography, state secret information, etc that would warrant such action. I am a strong skeptic though in general, so I prefer to have some transparency to know that sites are not brought down/restricted for reasons the general population would not agree with.
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