The danger of Google's censorship

Google seems to be getting increasing criticism for censorship. Much of it is unwarranted. The biggest complaint is over Google caving in to Chinese censorship (along with Yahoo and other search engines.)

But Google is actually trying its best to serve China's needs appropriately. Google has been producing a Chinese language search engine without censorship for yers, but it got little traffic. It was censored by the Great Firewall of China, and was slowed down enormously by the Chinese filtering. Google, by the way, still runs the site remotely from Chinese soil, so Chinese surfers can still access it. But it has now added an official Chinese version as well, based in China. Google employees are now in China building it, in order to improve Chinese access to the internet in general.

As long as Google is on Chinese soil, it has to obey Chinese Law (just as it obeys German laws against calling up neo-nazi sites, and eBay has to conform to laws against selling Nazi memorabilia.) And Google has decided not to offer email or social networking in China, in order to avoid the need to turn over the identities of users who make anti-government statements, as Yahoo has had to do.

I had lunch with Google CEO Eric Schmidt during the company's annual meeting recently, and he succinctly stated the problem with China.

"If we don't obey Chinese law, our employees there will be jailed and tortured," says Schmidt. "I have a problem with that."

Now there are reports that Google censors out right-wing sites. In fact, it appears that Google censors sites that promote hate, not members of the Republican party. The biggest sinners Google is censoring appear to be, not news sites, but hate sites and blogs, especially against Islam (a popular target these days.) Slashdot cites a few examples.

Google, I'm sure, believes this is part of its mandate to do no evil--something that other critics think Google does not adhere to enough. Google tries to filter out porn sites and doesn't accept ads from them or other sinful advertisers, like cigarette and alcohol advertisers. But it is being sued for allegedly making money off kiddie porn. Sergey is Jewish, but the company does not censor out Hamas sites that are anti-Israel. He has also been criticized for that.

Contrary to popular opinion, Google News has never been unbiased. Two years ago, in a speech at Stanford, Schmidt told a story about Google News. Someone had asked him what bias Google News had. He told them, "We don't have a bias. It searches the news." But when he got back to HQ, he asked the developer of Google News if it had a bias. The answer was yes. It's biased to bring up more soccer results, because Americans don't pay enough attention to soccer. The developer was a big soccer fan.

Google does censor. But it is in a difficult place. The danger is in the fact that it censors at all. Newsbusters is right; it's a slippery slope. Which is why U.S. laws, cherishing freedom of speech, do not prohibit unpopular ideas--although there are laws aginst hate groups and folks advocating violence. If Google did not cut out such sites, it would be criticized from the other side.

The only way for Google to avoid that slope is to clearly state, on its news site, the topics or attitudes that it refuses to link to. This would not give away important Google secrets. The company has biases, as do we all. If Google is not careful, the calls to regulate it as an essential service and a monopoly will grow.