Leave aside the fact that Google was happy to censor results for China until its servers were hacked. The fact is, Google still censors search results in other countries at the request of their governments. […] Censoring results for years, shifting course for entirely unrelated reasons, and then vilifying competitors who don’t jump on the bandwagon. (Though, of course, completely Google’s prerogative.) But it’s particularly hypocritical when Google is still happily censoring its search and YouTube products for other countries.
http://www.businessinsider.com
Today’s post on my using the Net without search engines I wrote in Berlin. Accordingly it is burdened with
the pompous solemness of a federal capital.
The indifferent position of Google, Microsoft and other media conglomerates – up to being willingly supportive to regimes of injustice – should earn our harshest criticism. Reports like Google giving in with the French authorities leave also a feeling of helplessness. What happens if such a core part of our communication infrastructure can be bound by mere administrative acts?
Obviously something is missing: to respect online media as more and more relevant platforms of the formation of our political and social opinion; to grant online media the constitutional and administrative rank, that they should get for long by their relevance.
With censorship we usually associate violent suppression of critical opinions or positions that deviate from the mainstream. The expatriation of Ovid, the church’s index, the bourgeois-authoritarian censorship in Metternich’s Deutscher Bund – to the murderous systems of totalitarian censorship in the twentieth century: at first sight there are few reasons why it should be allowed to states to limit free speech and the access thereto.
However, taking a more subtle perspective there are very well some points why we do have the right to argue with Google. Defamation, breaking laws, hate speech, all this is banned from media with good reason. And with good cause there is the Press Council and the option to go to court. We should not let us getting persuaded, that our asking for keeping to democratic rights would be breaching the dyke (what a metaphor!) for censorship and would take us the legitimation to promote globally our understanding of freedom of opinion.
To regard the Internet as today’s broadcasting, as the Bavarian prime minister has demanded in his key note to this year’s Medientage München Conference, I consider completely justified. The Internet not just takes the role that broadcasting used to hold, it even today does much more in distributing opinion, information and entertainment than the publishers or broadcasters would ever have.
So it is even more important to take care for plurality, for a multitude of offerings amongst which also the publicly funded, cultural, and journalistic freedom should be found.
Although I am living my third day without search engines, I am not that naïve to believe my own Google-fasting to be more than a temporally limited abstinence: I do not want to abandon search engines permanently or totally. I wished that out Europe’s societies’ centre would form a liberal civil rights movement, articulating atractive alternatives of the kind of Wikipedia or OpenStreetmap in the Net.
The other posts of my experiment “Without Google”:
and the beginning of the experiment:
