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

Censorship has the opposite effect?

[wheelgun]

Whenever I see news about 'extreme right' public demonstrations in Germany, the gatherings are attended by hundreds and often many thousands of people. They march, they speak, they carry banners. They are well organized and very disciplined compared to their American fringe counterparts.

Here in America were such political speech laws don't exist (yet), public gatherings of similar groups rarely number over 20 or 30 people who are usually shouted down or ignored. Many of their publicized events result in nobody showing up at all.

If political censorshop was really effective I would expect to see the exact opposite thing on our respective sides of the pond. I can only draw the conclusion that Germans consider themselves mentally inferior to Americans and unable to cope with the level of freedom we enjoy in this area.

But that is OK. Being freer than the rest of the world is what makes us special- while it lasts.