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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.'"
Remember China announcing a moon program long ago. It was on all the Goog's hits. Then your president announced he was going to cancel the Ares I program & those Goog search results on China vanished. People began supporting the Ares I cancellation, saying there were no search results for China's moon program.
It's very difficult to be smart and not lean to the left. case and point: See Ted Conferences (ted.com)
Google is top because it's a very quick and robust search engine and has always had the policy of keeping users privacy a one of their top priorities.