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."

Comments

Darn...no more Hitler pics

[Mr. Capris]

So that means no more Hitler...or anything remotely linked to WWII...i feel bad for the German student writing the book report about WWII's causes...that's gonna be pretty odd...

EU Constitution and Free Speech?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't part of the EU constitution a bit about free speech?
How does that affect these national laws which prevent us from expressing hate openly?

Re:EU Constitution and Free Speech?

[Elektroschock]

The EU constitution DRAFT is a piece of crap and a real danger to democracy. It even specifies the goals of state policy as in cuba and regulates what European Parties have to stand for. Most European politicians support it because it provides an improvement of the state of the Union. However this draft is not meant for eternity and I reject it as there are so many flaws. In the European Union currently a "Safer Internet" program is run by DG InfoSoc. In Italy politicians put forward a "self-regulatory" framework as a hosted in the national administration with a government majority.

See: http://www.eifonline.org/site_16/fil/fil_35.doc

four members representing the Adherents designated by the Associations that have signed the current Code;

- two members, one of whom will act as President and represent the Ministry of Communications, and two representing the Presidency of the Council of the Ministers, and specifically the Department for Innovation and Technology;

- three members designated by Associations for the safeguarding of minors and by the National Council for Users.

These will be chosen from the participants in the working-group Internet@minori, which has been set up at the Ministry of Communications.

The Ministry of Communications provides the Secretariat to support the activities of the Committee.

Italian Parliament is not in charge, it is a private law agreement between Italy and the Internet providers and enforced via private law.

Re:.de

[Etherwalk]

When I was in Canada last, I noticed google automatically redirected you to Google.ca, presumably based on my ISP. That being said, I didn't care enough at the time to try to get around it, so google.com may have been perfectly available.

Re:America

[-brazil-]

> While you may not agree with the way people thought and acted in the past, it is important NOT to whitewash history, and re-write it

That's definitely not what German laws against Nazi propaganda try to do. You can discuss history quite freely, provided that you don't promote Nazi ideals, or claim that there was no mass-murder on Jews, etc. In fact, even outright Nazi propaganda pieces like the movie "Jud Süß" can be shown if it's done in a proper context, like a history exhibition. My 10th grade history textbook quoted passages from "Mein Kampf"... quite effectively showing what a paranoid nutjob Hitler was.