[governance] Google to Censor Blogposts

[David Cake]

On 24 Feb 2015, at 11:17 pm, Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> OK, “Internet Freedom”/FOE folks what do you think of this one?

	It is an issue largely because of Googles near monopoly on search. It would be interesting to know if Google Blogger content is indexable by other search engines?

	It isn’t a direct censorship issue - despite the misleading wording of the google warning ("can only be seen by the owner or admins of the blog and the people who the owner has shared the blog with.” - but I’m fairly sure this means ‘can only be found if you share the URL directly’, rather than ‘the admin needs to directly authorise it’, which are *very* different cases. If it does mean the former, then I would expect a mass migration away.) And, of course, free speech has never meant that others must allow you to use their publishing platform say whatever you want, especially for free. Google is such a large player in search that such decisions need to be looked at carefully though.

> More privatization of the law?

	Those that choose to build on property owned by another have always given up some control in the process (note Google are only talking about search results for content on the blogger platform, which is owned by google). It is like a property manager making conditions of their tenants - the situation was privatised from the start.

> Good idea/bad idea?\

	It is a puzzling decision, because Google clearly has the ability to simply block blogs with nudity from those with the (opt-out) Safe Search option set. I presume Google have good reasons. Google ia large content company, that experiences a lot of pressure from a wide variety of legal and political directions. Though they provide many services for free, they are under no compulsion to continue providing free services that they find problematic as a company. I presume Google, as owner of both search and blog platform vendor here, is keen enough to be seen not to be receiving income from pornographic content that they are willing to forgo the (incidental) AdSense income.

	I appreciate that Google added the options to permit searchable nudity for various non-sexual purposes. That opens a bucket of worms (for example, does it work on a blog by blog or post by post basis, because many people mix content types on their blogs, or what about art that is both of artistic merit and sexually explicit?), but I assume Google is prepared for that.

	In other words - this is worth watching, because Google is large enough that their policy positions matter. Next time I speak to any Google public policy people, I may bring this up. But it doesn’t represent a significant change in the balance of free expression on the internet  -  platform owners have always been able to have some control over the content available on their platform, and this does not actually remove content only change its visibility, and there are migration options.

	Cheers

		David



> 
> http://techaeris.com/2015/02/24/google-warns-users-will-censor-blogger-porn/
> 
> M
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