Google censorship

I hadn't quite realized the degree to which Google "fine-tunes" their results. It appears they do, in fact, exercise a certain degree of censorship, which is kind of disturbing. Observe Zittrain and Edelman's preliminary study comparing the results of google.com versus google.fr and google.de.

The issue is actually a rather interesting one that cuts to the heart of the Internet age. The reason everyone is salivating to invest in Google is that they seem the best positioned company to serve as the portal through which everyone gets to the Internet. AOL tried to do this, in their own way, and this is part of why they were a darling of the tech bubble. But, of course, they failed. They were overly ambitious: they sought to actually reshape the internet by creating a veneer over it. They wanted AOL to _be_ the Internet. Problem is, the Internet doesn't want to be controlled by AOL. Enter Google.

Google had the much more workable idea of simply being a directory for the Internet. They have no interest in controlling every last inch of cyberspace (per se). They just want to be the resource you go to to find what you're looking for. Turns out, this is pretty much just as powerful as controlling the Internet as a whole, and yet it still allows the Internet to grow independently.

However, that power is exactly the trouble. Think about how often you use Google to find what you're looking for. Hell, half the time even if you know what website you're going to, you still go to Google to pull up the actual URL for you because you're lazy. Think about the power that gives them. They control exactly what you can and cannot see. If they choose not to list your website, you may very well never see it! Even if you do, 99.999% of the rest of the population won't (because they're not as tech savvy as you are, you clever dog).

Think, for a minute, what would happen if the government owned Google. What if the government had that kind of power over what information you could and could not find? Wouldn't that freak you the fuck out?

And yet, there are at least some checks on government. You have the power to vote elected officials out of office if they piss you off. You essentially have no such power over Google. You have no say. And there are no laws governing what Google can and cannot list, really. They're completely lacking in oversight. The only thing that's there to keep them honest is whether they can continue to get ad revenue. As it happens, that does tend to keep them somewhat honest, and yet...it should still make you supremely uneasy.

Anyway, here's a list of other sources from someone on the Harvard tech forum mailing list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-03-02-n19.html
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/
http://www.sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-censorship.php
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_removes_German_BMW_from_search_results
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/27/google_doesnt_censor/