[burnished]

>>It's certainly censorship if a monopolistic or oligopolistic platform does it

this seems like a good point, I'll have to think on it. For this particular situation I'm having a hard time seeing the argument on the basis that .xyz domains are cheap and get used for lots of attacks as stated in the article, so is it censorship or defense?

I think the question at the heart of my disagreement would be "what speech is being censored?", I don't see a compelling answer so I have a hard time seeing it as censorship at all.

[marcosdumay]

It would get deep into the grey area if Google users had any capacity of enabling the communications with those sites. As of today, Google is the one in control of the communications, and dictate who can reach anybody over most of the internet. They just don't have a policy of empowering their users to decide who they want to talk to.

What speech is being censored is harder to discover. They are blocking people from communication without any feedback, and it would take a large effort to reach them and discover who they are. Certainly most of what is blocked is spam, but that's true for whatever block you implement today, unless you spend an unreasonable amount of resources targeting it into non-spam.

[burnished]

OK, I think we are probably pretty close in agreement. I still don't think censorship is the appropriate word here but also want to be clear that is what I am disagreeing about, not any of the larger issues.