Slashdot Mirror
German Search Engines Self-Regulating
Philipp Lenssen writes "Heise reports the German search engines Google.de, Lycos Europe, MSN Germany, AOL Germany, Yahoo.de, T-Online and T-Info today in Berlin announced the forming of a self-regulating organization (Babelfish version) under the hood of the German FSM (the "Voluntary Self-Control for Multimedia Service Providers"). Their combined goal is to streamline the process of censoring content ruled illegal under German law, so that a user's search results are stripped from such items."
Have you read the laws coming out of the conservatives in the US lately?
...most "illegal content".
For example, we aren't allowed to hand out leaflets that say nobody died at Auschwitz. We are however free to believe so and tell friends, if we so choose. The strong laws against fascism in Germany are often viewed as an impediment to free speech by outsiders, but most fail to remember these laws were not originally and entirely devised by Germans.
Personally, I don't view incitement to crime being forbidden as a restriction of free speech. "I'll pay you $50 and a PS2 if you murder my mom" is illegal in most places. It's simply not a matter of free speech that you can't legally order or pay people to commit a crime for you. It is still legal to overhear someone saying something along these lines.
The one real exception to this is child pornography. We can't even own any. I don't think that's a bad thing because this allows for interrogation of consumers. If it weren't illegal for us to store child porn on our hard disks, police couldn't extract the source from a consumer. I'm for free speech, but free speech doesn't mean we're free to abuse children, too. The crime is not trading images anyway. It's making the original pictures that's being punished here.
And finally - ever used google image search? Its default setting filters out lots of junk, i.e., porn. I don't know about you guys but I'm usually not using google to search for porn. I'm also not usually looking for national socialist propaganda and neither for pictures of young children. This means, for me they're not censoring the results, they're enhancing them. They're also not removing them from the net, so it isn't censorship anyway.