From the Tyee:

Have Telus managers been brushing up on Orwell?

The company's mantra insists "the future is friendly," but critics say Telus is stifling the Internet to sweep the less-than-friendly bits of their past out of sight.

Earlier this month, Telus ordered YouTube to take down at least 23 videos posted to the site. Each short movie was potentially embarrassing to the telecom's public image since they documented instances of the company's rocky labour relations. Telus claimed their presence on YouTube, a user-generated website, was an act of copyright infringement.

YouTube's owners complied and took the videos off-line, but that set off alarm bells among union activists, who argue much of the footage never belonged to Telus in the first place.

The move also raised hackles with Internet free speech advocates because it appears to be part of a pattern that sees the telecom giant manipulating the web for anti-union purposes. They point to what happened in 2005, when Telus made international headlines by blocking 766 websites in order to bar access to a single pro-union one.