Slashdot Mirror
Google's Gatekeepers
theodp writes "With control of 63% of the world's Internet searches, as well as ownership of YouTube, the NY Times reports that Google is the most powerful and protean of the Internet gatekeepers, exerting enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. Deciding what controversial material does and doesn't appear on the local search engines Google maintains in many countries — as well as on Google.com, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, and Orkut — falls on the shoulders of Nicole Wong and her colleagues, who have arguably been given more influence over online expression than anyone else on the planet. Some find Google's gatekeeper role worrisome: 'If your whole game is to increase market share,' says Lawrence Lessig, 'it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.'"
So what is the big deal? Google censors some things, don't like it? Go to one of the thousands of other search engines. The thing about search engines is there is almost no learning curve and its incredibly easy to switch, want to use Yahoo? Just type in Yahoo rather than Google. Replace Yahoo for whatever search engine you want. If people really think that Google's censorship policies are bad for the internet the internet will switch to another search engine or create their own. The internet evolves fast, 10 years ago we didn't use Google we used other search engines, 10 years from now we probably won't use Google, we will use something else. Can't wait 10 years? Just go to a different search engine. Seriously, censorship is bad but this is the internet, not the government-regulated airspace, there is no FCC, it is global.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I use Google for searches, but I could easily switch to Yahoo, AltaVista or even MSN.
Until Google start doing things to stop people using other search engines, there's no problem. If people object to the dominance of Google, they must either campaign for users to move to other engines, or create a better engine and gain marketshare.
Try reading the newspapers, or even searching Google for 'google censorship in China'. The top of the search shows the BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4645596.stm.
So, in fact, China censors 'illegal material' which is a violation of UN treaties to censor in international communications. The idea of 'do no harm' is not good enough for such a large and powerful company: the idea of 'do no harm in China' by not bothering their government is in direct contrast to 'do no harm in China' by restricting the speech of those who disagree with the government.