The UK government is reportedly planning to force Google to block or downgrade illegal filesharing websites such as The Pirate Bay.
The move is part of the government’s efforts to fight online priracy, said The Guardian in a report.
The report said that the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is expected to call the US-based search engine comapny to "make life more difficult" for websites that infringe copyright.
Hunt is also expected to urge media executives that Internet companies, advertisers and credit card firms to do more to stop online priracy, said the report.
"We intend to take measures to make it more and more difficult to access sites that deliberately facilitate infringement, misleading consumers and depriving creators of a fair reward for their creativity," Hunt will tell the Royal Television Society convention in Cambridge on Wednesday evening, said the report.
"We do not allow certain products to be sold in the shops on the high street, nor do we allow shops to be set up purely to sell counterfeited products. Neither should we tolerate it online," Hunt is expected to say.
According to the report, Google said, "Google has industry-leading measures to fight online piracy. We work hand in hand with copyright owners to remove infringing material from search results. Without a court order, any copyright owner can already use our removals process to inform us of copyright infringing content and have it removed from Google search.
"We recently announced a series of measures that make this process even easier, bringing our removal time down to an average of four hours."
