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There's one big difference, and it's Orwellian -- courts and politicians are claiming that removing something from a search engine isn't censorship.
by greglindahl 9y ago
There's one big difference, and it's Orwellian -- courts and politicians are claiming that removing something from a search engine isn't censorship.
- paxys 9y agoYup, essentially "we're not blocking any content, just blocking any means for you to find it".
- humanrebar 9y agoThat and answering questions isn't considered speech when the thing answering is a search engine.
- greglindahl 9y agoI’m a guy who builds search engines incorporating some human curation and editorial policies, ... I’m pretty sure I could make a strong case that the 1st Amendment covers me in the US.
- Zarath 9y agoTo be fair, those are two different things.
- paxys 9y agoThe end result is the same -- people are less informed. In general it is always impossible to have this conversation because the idea of "free speech" is very different in America compared to Europe.
- mirimir 9y agoAs I understand it, Google only blocks this stuff for searches from the EU. So all you need is a VPN with a non-EU IP address, and you can find whatever. Right?
- chrononaut 9y agoWhile valid, only a fraction of the population would know to do this, and then a smaller fraction would believe it's worthwhile. It's an added inconvenience that has to outweigh the disadvantages of not doing it.
- mirimir 9y agoTrue. And thanks for confirming my supposition. It's rare to see this mentioned in coverage of the issue. For reasons that are understandable, I guess. The EU has pressured Google to censor its results globally, as I recall. But Google has prevailed on that, at least. So far, anyway.
- greglindahl 9y agoEven if Google can resist the EU about global censorship, small search engines can't afford to.
- mirimir 9y agoTrue.
- ghaff 9y agoOr they just don't do business in the EU. Lots of US businesses (and, for that matter Chinese, Japanese, etc.) just do business in their home countries. To the degree the EU makes it too difficult for certain types of businesses to operate there, they won't. It's a big market but it's not that big. If businesses can pull out of China because they can't reasonably operate there, they can pull out of Europe.
- michaelmrose 9y agoFurther if Europe can ask for info to be censored what happens when 100 other nations ask the same for their own reasons. Will the search index be composed only of data that is acceptable to all parties?
- merb 9y agowell even if it is not. it's just so easy to just search another engine. it actually got easier to identify people who wanted to hide stuff.
- huntie 9y agoWhat other engine? As far as I know there are only a handful of search engines. Everyone else gets their data from these engines. Google, Bing, the French one. Probably one or two more.