[Reader-list] Google Excludes Controversial Sites

[Harsh Kapoor]

[Google continues to list the umpteen sites of the Hindu Right; 
Indian search engines of course dont seem to have any policy on hate 
speech and wont even think of excluding the nickerwalas.... The below 
news item might interest some on the sarai list. xxx Harsh]

o o o

The New York Times
October 24, 2002  

Google Excludes Controversial Sites
Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, News.com

Google, the world's most popular search engine, has quietly deleted 
more than 100 controversial sites from some search result listings.

Absent from Google's French and German listings are Web sites that 
are anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi or related to white supremacy, according 
to a new report from Harvard University's Berkman Center. Also banned 
is Jesus-is-lord.com, a fundamentalist Christian site that is 
adamantly opposed to abortion.

Google confirmed on Wednesday that the sites had been removed from 
listings available at Google.fr and Google.de. The removed sites 
continue to appear in listings on the main Google.com site.

The Harvard report, prepared by law student Ben Edelman and assistant 
professor Jonathan Zittrain, and scheduled to be released Thursday, 
is the result of automated testing of Google's massive 2.5 
billion-page index and a comparison of the results returned by 
different foreign-language versions. The duo found 113 excluded 
sites, most with racial overtones.
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"To avoid legal liability, we remove sites from Google.de search 
results pages that may conflict with German law," said Google 
spokesman Nate Tyler. He indicated that each site that was delisted 
came after a specific complaint from a foreign government.

German law considers the publication of Holocaust denials and similar 
material as an incitement of racial and ethnic hatred, and therefore 
illegal. In the past, Germany has ordered Internet providers to block 
access to U.S. Web sites that post revisionist literature.

France has similar laws that allowed a students' antiracism group to 
successfully sue Yahoo in a Paris court for allowing Third Reich 
memorabilia and Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" to be sold on the 
company's auction sites. In November 2001, a U.S. judge ruled that 
the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech protects Yahoo from 
liability.

Google's battles
The Harvard report comes as Google is becoming increasingly embroiled 
in international political disputes over copyright and censorship. 
China blocked access to Google last month.

Google was criticized in March for bowing to a demand from the Church 
of Scientology to delete critical sites from its index. In a response 
that won praise, Google replied by pledging to report future legal 
threats to the ChillingEffects.org site run by law school clinics.

As Google has become the way more and more people find information on 
the Internet, it has also become an increasingly visible target for 
copyright complaints about cached information and allegedly 
infringing links. ChillingEffect.org's Google section lists 16 
requests or legal threats the company has received in the past three 
months. One Google competitor and critic even suggested that the 
wildly popular search engine be transformed into a 
government-controlled "public utility."

Edelman, who created the program that tested URLs against Google's 
index, said he was investigating a tip about Google's German-language 
version.

"One concern that I've had for some time vis-a-vis filtering is that 
filtering is almost always secretive," Edelman said. "In the (library 
filtering) case, that meant you can't look at the list of blocked 
sites. In the Chinese government case, you can't see what sites are 
being blocked."

Edelman, who is a first-year law student, testified as an expert 
witness for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in a court 
challenge to a law requiring libraries to install filtering software 
if they accept federal funds. He is also a plaintiff in a second 
lawsuit filed in June to eviscerate key portions of the Digital 
Millennium Copyright Act.

Google's response
Google refused to reply to a list of questions that CNET News.com 
sent via e-mail, including which sites have been delisted, how many 
sites have been delisted, what standards are used, and what other 
Google-operated sites have less-than-complete listings.

In an e-mail response, Google's Tyler said: "As a matter of company 
policy we do not provide specific details about why or when we 
removed any one particular site from our index. We occasionally 
receive notices from partners, users, government agencies and the 
like about sites in our index. We carefully consider any credible 
complaint on a case-by-case basis and take necessary action when 
needed. This is not pre-emptive--we only react to requests that come 
to us...to avoid legal liability, we remove sites from Google search 
results pages that may conflict with local laws."

Tyler said an internal team involving lawyers, management and 
engineers makes the final decision on what to remove. "At Google we 
take these types of decisions very seriously," he said. "The 
objective is to limit legal exposure while continuing to deliver high 
quality search results that enable our users to find the information 
they need quickly and easily."

Tyler pointed to Google's terms of service agreement, which says 
Google will "consider on a case-by-case basis requests" to remove 
links from its index.

A moving target
Because Google has to keep track of a constantly moving target--new 
sites arguably illegal under French or German law appear every 
day--the search engine is encountering the same problems of 
overinclusiveness that traditional filtering software has experienced.

According to the Harvard report, some sites that Google does not list 
include 1488.com, a "Chinese legal consultation network," and 
14words.com, a discount Web-hosting service and some conservative, 
anti-abortion religious sites. Those sites do not appear to violate 
either German or French laws.

Banned from Google.de and Google.fr listings is Stormfront.org, one 
of the Internet's most popular "white pride" sites. Stormfront 
features discussion areas, a library of white nationalist articles 
and essays by David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.

"We've been dealing with this for quite a few years," said Don Black, 
who runs the site. "The German police agencies seem obsessed with 
Stormfront even though we're not focused on any German language 
material."

Black, who learned a few months ago that Google.de delisted 
Stormfront, says he doesn't hold it against the Mountain View, 
Calif.-based company. "Google is trying to conform to their 
outrageous laws," Black said. "So there's really nothing we can do 
about it. It's really a French and German issue rather than a Google 
issue."

The First Amendment
Because Google is a company and not a government agency, it has the 
right in general to delete listings from its service or alter the way 
they appear. (On Tuesday, however, CNET News.com reported that an 
Oklahoma advertising company has sued Google over its position in 
search results.)

"Google may not only have the legal right to (delete listings), they 
may have the legal obligation to do it," said Barry Steinhardt, 
director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program, and a 
co-founder of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign.

"Over the long term, this will become a significant issue on the 
Net," Steinhardt said. "There's a wide variety of laws around the 
world prohibiting different forms of speech. You can imagine what the 
Chinese government prohibits versus what the French government 
prohibits versus what the U.S. government prohibits."

Edelman, of Harvard's Berkman Center, suggests that Google find a way 
to alert users that information is missing from their search results.

"If Google is prohibited from linking to Stormfront, they could 
include a listing but no link," Edelman said. "And if they can't even 
include a listing for Stormfront, they could at least report the fact 
that they've hidden results from the user. The core idea here is that 
there's no need to be secretive."