Imagine what being Google must be like. Since the start of the year, the company has roiled up world affairs with its decision to stop censoring Chinese search results, got the NSA to help it out with security, launched a new social media service called Buzz, and dropped a bombshell on the US by announcing a new 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home testbed that will serve up to 500,000 people.

Crazy stuff, right? And it all happened in the last six weeks. But zoom in a bit closer and look at what Google had to deal with just this week and on just one topic: censorship.

Australia

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, the man currently pushing the nation into a broad Internet filtering scheme that would be run by ISPs, gave an interview this week to the TV show Hungry Beast (Aussie readers can watch the segment online).

In it, he said that the ISP filtering solution was unworkable for big sites like YouTube, since the goal would be to block only particular videos. This requires precise URL matching, not just a blanket block on YouTube traffic, and it's hard to make this work at scale for a site like YouTube without unacceptable slowdowns. So Conroy had a brilliant solution: get Google to do the filtering for him.

"What we're saying is, well in Australia, these are our laws and we'd like you to apply our laws," Conroy said. He added, "Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government."

This could basically have come out of the mouth of a Chinese official, and it plays right into the idea that differences in censorship between countries are merely acceptable differences of local law (which is the claim that China has made, repeatedly, in recent weeks, to justify its widespread Internet surveillance and firewall system).

On the other hand, Conroy has a point; Google does take on the filtering of locally objectionable content in some jurisdictions, though the China example was a pretty poor choice given that Google has recently kicked up a huge fuss about precisely this kind of censorship.

What Conroy wants is for YouTube to voluntarily censor all material on its site that is "Refused Classification" by the Australian ratings board, a government agency. Google has refused to do this voluntarily, saying that RC material is simply too broad in scope.

Pakistan

If there's one thing YouTube has taught us, it's that when people can upload their own content, they will upload inflammatory videos about political leaders... and those leaders will then try to block YouTube. We saw it back in 2007 in Thailand, where the archaic rule against lèse majesté led to a wholesale block against YouTube.

This week, the problem country was Pakistan, where someone uploaded a video of President Zardari at a political rally. In the clip, Zardari gets irritated at some people near the stage and yells at them in English to "shut up!"

After the clip (and assorted remixes became popular), YouTube was blocked for a short time, and then the block was changed to filter out only the offending clips. It's not clear who was behind the move, but the videos remain up on YouTube and can easily be viewed outside of Pakistan.

An ABC news correspondent living in Islamabad checked with his ISP. "One official said he was under the impression all had been fixed—and insisted nobody from his side was specifically restricting embarrassing videos of the democratically elected president. 'It must be some restriction from government side,' he said, confirming that the videos had been restricted. He laughed and joked, 'Zardari might be blocking it himself!'"

Iran

But it's not just YouTube that makes leaders nervous. Iran's government, facing major internal unrest over its recent election results and resulting brutality, Iran simply blocked Gmail altogether. Instead, according to the Wall Street Journal, the regime will roll out its own e-mail service soon.

"An Iranian official said the move was meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government," said the paper. And really, what could build more trust between a government and those who fear it than making it far simpler for that government to monitor e-mail?

The move came one day before the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, and Google reports that it has already seen big drops in traffic to Gmail from Iran.

One Iranian-American blog notes that, after last year's election unrest, "the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) purchased a controlling stake in the Iranian telecom company, giving them wide latitude to monitor and disrupt communication throughout the country. It is no surprise that Gmail is being targeted—given Google’s recent actions regarding government censorship in China, as well as the fact that Gmail has widely been regarded as one of the more secure email services available to the public. Iranian human rights defenders and activists among the One Million Signatures women's rights campaign often encourage each other to utilize Gmail, instead of Yahoo or other email services, due to the level of security it offers."

While Google remains a technology company, the events of this week drive home an important point: the company is a powerful worldwide political force. Its services are major targets for government censorship, and its pronouncements can kickstart international rows. It may not be long before Google moves beyond the need for lobbyists and starts hiring diplomats; it's not a country, but Google is close to needing an internal "State Department" of its own.