Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Google Takes One For the Team
For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost.The U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned a law attempting to block online child pornography due to a technicality. They told the Justice Department they would revisit the case if they could show the law did work to deter the use of child pornography on the internet. In turn, the Justice Department decided the best way to provide such evidence was to show how accessible the material is online, and the best way to do show would be to present the court with a list of every search engine query in a given weekly period. And so the Justice Department subpoenaed every search engine to get said list, and every search engine complied.
Save one.
Google might be big enough now that its looked on with the suspicion usually reserved for national governments, but it put its money where its mouth is, literally. It refused to divulge the information, and now the government is taking them to court to get the information. The court battle has already cost the Search Engine 8% of its stock value.
Let's hope that even with this added financial pressure they stick to their guns. This time, the requested list is narrow, and does not contains actual IP addresses of the incoming queries. But it sets a dangerous precedent, and it wouldn't take much more pressure to require companies to divulge that information. And once you get to that point, the idea of the internet that is free exchange of ideas loses its solid foundation, and you're one step away from a Chinese-like control of what is said and not said online - an effort that already has the backing of the same search engines.
For the want of a nail, a war was lost.
------------------------------------------------