
Google blacklists - eplanit
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated
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brianlweiner
This critique confuses me:

"In December 2014, facing a new law in Spain that would have charged Google
for scraping content from Spanish news sources (which, after all, have to pay
to prepare their news), Google suddenly withdrew its news service from Spain,
which led to an immediate drop in traffic to Spanish new stories."

So Spanish law changed to try and force Google to pay for indexing their news
content therefore Google responded by no longer indexing their news content -
and then they complained they weren't being indexed?

~~~
euyyn
Spanish here: It's exactly like you described, and shameful. To add to the
idiocy, it happened right after Germany enacted a similar law, the difference
being the German version let news organizations negotiate collective
agreements with search engines. Obviously, in less than 1 second, they had an
agreement with Google to index for free, because they wanted the traffic more
than a fee. So the Spanish government thought they could outsmart the Germans
and made a version in which payment was compulsory for all search engines.
Everybody saw it coming, except the government.

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jbob2000
I get that google has the _power_ to censor, but the examples the author
gives... I kind of side with google for most of it.

They _need_ to censor autocomplete, otherwise all sorts of depraved crap will
turn up. Like another commenter here said, just start typing
"jews/muslims/gays/blacks/whites are..." on DuckDuckGo to see why it's needed.

I get the google maps blacklist too. 99.99999% of people will not need to see
the areas that are blacked out. Those that want to see them, probably
shouldn't! It's a consumer-level mapping tool, it's for showing your kids some
geography and getting directions to your friend's cottage.

I understand why Google obeys foreign governments too. They're a private
business, if Pakistan wants to censor youtube, let them. From a Western
perspective, we think this is bad, but we don't live in Pakistan to fully
understand why they need that control. It's not Google's job to be prescribing
to foreign countries how they should operate.

And I get why they blacklist websites and entire domains. Sorry, but co.cc
_was_ being abused, it needed to go. Whatever google is doing to fight spam is
working, my inbox is clean as a whistle, I literally can't remember the last
time I got spam.

Ultimately, my point is that, yes google "censors" things. But I haven't seen
them do anything that's terribly "evil", it's generally been under the scope
of providing a better user experience.

~~~
greglindahl
It's also worth pointing out that "freedom of the press" in the US means
freedom for businesses that own printing presses. Removing stuff from
autocomplete is an editorial decision. Removing and reordering stuff in search
results can be an editorial decision. As someone who tried (and failed) to
compete with Google's search engine, I don't think the US government should
regulate editorial decisions of search engines.

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DannyBee
[some people seem super annoyed that i pointed it out, and it seems to have
brought out the brigade, so i'm just editing this out]

~~~
twblalock
Why would someone write an article like this if they didn't have an agenda?
Every author has biases, whether or not they are conscious or overt.

The better approach is to use your critical thinking skills and avoid ad
hominem judgments about the author.

~~~
DannyBee
"Why would someone write an article like this if they didn't have an agenda?"

Errr, to start a discussion?

You don't have to have agendas to have reasoned intellectual discussions.

"Every author has biases, whether or not they are conscious or overt."

This is such a throw away line i'm not sure why you added it.

"The better approach is to use your critical thinking skills and avoid ad
hominem judgments about the author."

In theory, yes, but honestly, i find it's not worth my time when i know it
means he's likely leaving out info, etc, instead of trying to present stuff in
a reasonable way.

I tend to see others do the same. I don't think you will change this (see, as
an example, the viewpoints of the entire populace on pretty much anything, and
the way they treat information presented by people they feel have agendas).

You can argue till you are blue in the face that this is not what should
happen, but it won't change that it does :)

~~~
twblalock
> This is such a throw away line i'm not sure why you added it.

If you understood it, you would not have written something so naive as
"Honesty, i wish articles like this were written by people without agendas, so
that real discussions would be had."

~~~
DannyBee
So i see we are back to ad hominen.

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mthoms
What garbage. For one, the safe browsing API does not disclose URLs to Google.
Instead, a 4 byte hash prefix is used[0]. I'll leave it to others to dissect
the rest of the FUD in this poorly researched piece.

[0] [https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v3/update-
guide](https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v3/update-guide)

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jsmith0295
The state probably ought to actually be transparent before doing this.
Otherwise, you're just going to make the state the biggest censor rather than
Google, which is a much worse problem in my opinion.

~~~
greglindahl
How much transparency is involved in the European Right to be Forgotten? None.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Google actually acts as the censor in RTBF. While the government has publicly
set the criteria for processing RTBF requests, Google itself is tasked with
making the decision whether or not to remove a site from search results.

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twblalock
I suspect that regulation will result in more censorship.

For example, EU regulations regarding the "right to be forgotten" have
resulted in Google being legally required to remove items from search results
that Google would not have removed otherwise.

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alexyim
It's definitely enlightening to see the autocomplete differences with another
search engine such as duckduckgo.com

~~~
greglindahl
DDG appears to not autocomplete dirty words, but try starting with [jews are]
or [muslims are] or [gays are] and you'll see the kind of stuff that
eventually led to Google's autocomplete being heavily scrubbed.

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schoen
Compare "Information Policy for the Library of Babel":
[http://james.grimmelmann.net/files/Library.markdown](http://james.grimmelmann.net/files/Library.markdown)

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leephillips
I noticed censorship and manipulation of viewership data on YouTube in 2008:

[http://lee-phillips.org/youtube/](http://lee-phillips.org/youtube/)

The article touches on this in its mention of Pakistan's influence on YouTube
policy.

The implications are rather chilling: Google allows the Pakistani government
to have a say in what Americans are allowed to see on the internet.

And this article, while it brings up important issues, would be far more
credible if it didn't make claims about "blocking the entire internet" and
wonder who "gave" Google the "right" to block whatever sites they wish to.

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_nickwhite
Access Denied

You don't have permission to access
"[http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-
is-...](http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-the-
worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated") on this server.

==/BLOCKEDBYGOOGLEBOT\==

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grb423
I see also that Twitter stops hashtags from auto-completing. I guess there's a
department responsible for the manual maintenance of a blacklist of ostensibly
offensive hashtags. I wish there was some transparency into this list for
trend analysis.

