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After more than a decade of timely updates, Google Search’s takedown transparency report has stalled since mid-April. The absence of new data makes it harder for journalists and researchers to analyze these DMCA takedown efforts, which have increased significantly over the past year and a half. Notably, Google continues to send these notices to the Lumen database, providing some ongoing visibility. 
In May 2012, Google Search expanded its transparency report with a new section solely dedicated to DMCA takedown requests.
For the first time, outsiders were able to see details of the URLs copyright holders were targeting and in what quantity.
The decision to make this information available for public scrutiny was partly triggered by a rapid increase in removal requests. This was having an impact on the “free flow of information”, according to the search engine.
While additional transparency helped to uncover serious errors and various abuses over the years, it didn’t curb the volume. On the contrary, legitimate DMCA takedown requests against search results shot up and thenn continued to grow.
The chart below shows the increase in takedowns over the years, with a notable uptick over the past year and a half.
Around November of last year, Google received its 10 billionth takedown request. Less than a year later, in April, this number had already increased by another 2.3 billion, or roughly 100 million takedowns per week. After that, Google’s transparency reporting updates froze.
For several months now, Google’s transparency report has been stuck at 12.3 billion reported URLs. No new information has been added since mid-April, which is a clear outlier as previous updates were typically released multiple times a week.
The most recent updates in the official transparency portal are dated April 13, and the official takedown charts for senders and URLs also stop on that date.
The raw takedown statistics and details, which Google offers in bulk for academic research and related purposes, are no longer being updated either. The 9.6 gigabyte compressed archive was last updated on April 14.
It’s unlikely that Google would halt its transparency reporting efforts without good reason. Thus far, however, the company has not responded to a press inquiry we sent earlier this week, asking for more information.
What is clear is that the company hasn’t stopped its transparency efforts entirely. Google is still forwarding the DMCA notices it receives to the Lumen database, which has data as recent as yesterday.
As a news publication that publishes multiple articles a year on Google’s DMCA takedown effort, it would be good to see the full reporting functionality restored.
At the same time, it would also be good to know why many of the publicly shared DMCA notices have redacted rightsholders or URLs. These can make it impossible to find out what content is actually being targeted, which negates the purpose of a transparency report.
In some cases the redactions also make little sense, such as the one below, where a takedown notice sent on behalf of Netflix redacted the domain of the original work as follows: n[redacted]x.com.
A representative from the Lumen database informed us that these redactions are not added at their end, so that suggests redactions are applied by Google.
All in all, Google still offers much more transparency than most online service providers. There is a delay in reporting at the moment, as well as unexplained redactions, but we hope that regular reporting will resume as usual soon, so we can look out for new multi-billion takedown milestones.
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