Google Is The World's Largest Censor And Must Be Regulated

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While the title of this article may seem a bit over the top, there is no denying that Google is indeed the world's biggest censor. The question now is, aside from government regulation, what can anyone do about it?

Google, Inc., isn't just the world's biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world's biggest censor. The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency. Google is not the only company suppressing content on the internet. Google, though, is currently the biggest bully on the block.
 
Outlaw censorship and kill all those who oppose. That is how you get shit done. I so miss Russian and Chinese websites popping up in my searches like the good old days.
 
I don't think there should be anything done about it to be honest. It's a company and it's their business model.

If someone doesn't agree with them they should stop using their service(s). Google didn't get as big as it is now on it's own.
 
Aren't the blacklists cause of companies like RIAA?
Don't think google blacklists anything unless someone makes them.
 
LOLOLOL.
Seriously? Lets discuss this in detail
1) Autocomplete - wtf you lazy toad, type out the word you want to search
2) Google Maps - google doesn't do it's own satellite imagery. They do street view only. The rest of the maps are purchased by navtech most likely. They're widely available in many different products. Blackouts come from bad images as well as governments who want to keep some areas secret.
3) Youtube - they have to do this or get sued via the DMCA
4) Accounts - they're providing free service. If you don't want to use them you don't have to. If they want to ban someone they're welcome to do so. They're not the government, they're a private corporation.
5) News aggregator - If i want news i'll check some sites. There's alternatives.
6) Adwords - they reserve the right to not allow certain ads based on some well established criteria. Don't like it, don't use them
7) Adsense - same as above
8) Search engine - ??
9) Blacklists - they're a search engine, they'll warn when someone else reports a website to be malicious. They can't stop you from going there.

Fucking retarded article.
 
Funny I just sent Kyle a screenshot about Google being evil, maybe I should have send it to Steve also?

When you get too big, you lose control of it even if you try [H]ard to do your best.
 
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People really need to learn what the word "censorship" actually means. Only governments can be truly guilty of censorship. If a private entity chooses not to share some information otherwise publicly available that isn't censorship because you can go somewhere else to get that information. Only governments possess the power to truly quash that access (even if some of them do it ineffectively). If you think Google is limiting your access to anything you truly want you have other options available to you.
 
Dwango said:
People really need to learn what the word "censorship" actually means. Only governments can be truly guilty of censorship. If a private entity chooses not to share some information otherwise publicly available that isn't censorship because you can go somewhere else to get that information. Only governments possess the power to truly quash that access (even if some of them do it ineffectively). If you think Google is limiting your access to anything you truly want you have other options available to you.
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Drink moar Kool-aid.
 
Galvin said:
Aren't the blacklists cause of companies like RIAA?
Don't think google blacklists anything unless someone makes them.
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Under shopping, apparently, there are no stores selling confederate flags...

I used duckduckgo but ended up with using bing.
 
Dwango said:
People really need to learn what the word "censorship" actually means. Only governments can be truly guilty of censorship. If a private entity chooses not to share some information otherwise publicly available that isn't censorship because you can go somewhere else to get that information. Only governments possess the power to truly quash that access (even if some of them do it ineffectively). If you think Google is limiting your access to anything you truly want you have other options available to you.
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I understand why you think that but that's not the definition for censorship. You're conforming your understanding of it as the only acceptable definition which is wrong.

cen·sor·ship
ˈsensərˌSHip/
noun
  1. the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts.

The 'etc..' part of that definition covers everything Google can suppress. So if Google doesn't give you hardocp.com when you search for 'hardocp' then they are censoring it. It has nothing to do whether its available somewhere else or not.
 
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Google is a publicly traded company, they aren't the government. They can suppress searches, but they can't censor. Only governments can censor. A lot of people miss this distinction and that's totally understandable.
 
Censorship isn't a problem unless it's the government doing it.
Everyone does it on a personal level. Choosing to listen to something, to read something, to think about something. All these choices eliminate other options.
As an example you may hate AMD and choose not to listen to any news about Zen. No one will disagree with your choices.
Corporations, public and private, have a right to choose what they do and don't do as long as it's lawful. If McDonalds didn't want to use chicken products, they're not forced to. If Tesla doesn't want to put in apple car products, that's their choice. You as a person also have a choice whether or not you eat at McDonalds or buy Tesla cars. There's competition out there, you speak with your money.

When government censors things, they usually do it with the punishment of law behind them. For example in Germany, if a person does a nazi salute they get thrown in jail. That's censorship. That's a problem because it forces people to do something under punishment of law.

What the article argues is that google is like a public utility (laughable) and should be regulated by the government (who's?) because of their choices in how they operate their businesses (most of the points are completely off).

As far as i can tell, google doesn't have a monopoly in any of it's businesses. If they did, then maybe a case could be made to regulate them like you would a power company, but until they are one i don't see any merit in the cases provided.
 
Steve said:
While the title of this article may seem a bit over the top, there is no denying that Google is indeed the world's biggest censor. The question now is, aside from government regulation, what can anyone do about it?

Google, Inc., isn't just the world's biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world's biggest censor. The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency. Google is not the only company suppressing content on the internet. Google, though, is currently the biggest bully on the block.
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Vernor Vinge brought this up in his book Rainbow's End http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/science/26tier.html?_r=0 (I enjoyed it) with protesters up in arms over a company digitizing all of the books in a university library. The protesters were angry as there was no oversight to make sure the books weren't being altered during the scanning process to fit someone else's view. Technology makes it easier than ever to dupe those who take what is presented as gospel. Overt censorship is easy to spot, it is the subtle changes that are insidious and of much greater concern. Oh that is an offensive period of history, let's scrub it from existence...
 
The author of that piece is an idiot, because he made the "Google sells your information to advertisers" statement. Google does not do that, it keeps all your information to itself and places relevant ads in front of your eyeballs.
 
magnetik said:
fwiw.. the lines separating Google and the government is getting hazier and hazier these days...
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Until Google can maintain and regulate and armed military force, tax your income at the point of a gun, print money, issue monetary policy, energy policy, and any other of the multitudes of functions that government does now, then that hazy line you are seeing of them creeping more and more into that sphere is nothing but an illusion. We really need to disabuse ourselves of these notions about how the largess of a company is somehow directly related to its imagined governmental powers. Nothing like that exists.
 
Methadras said:
Until Google can maintain and regulate and armed military force, tax your income at the point of a gun, print money, issue monetary policy, energy policy, and any other of the multitudes of functions that government does now, then that hazy line you are seeing of them creeping more and more into that sphere is nothing but an illusion. We really need to disabuse ourselves of these notions about how the largess of a company is somehow directly related to its imagined governmental powers. Nothing like that exists.
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Getting someone to do your dirty work is just as good as if you did it yourself.
 
I don't see how you could control Google's ability to control their search and other results. Essentially that is an artifact of them exercising their right of free expression (Free Speech). Companies routinely "censor" stuff all the time (I can't search for sex, games, guns and ammo, and other items on the company internet) and that is perfectly within their rights as a private entity. Just because they became a dominant entity in search doesn't make them the sole entity. They also don't delete or eliminate information, the simply choose to filter certain topics. Ultimately we would be best served by having the government stay out of this and letting the free market choose whether they agree with Google's filtering choices or not. That is kind of how the free market is supposed to work.
 
Maybe we can get Steve to poll for a list of search terms and search engines, then do the research and show a cool diagram with the results.
 
Sonicks said:
cen·sor·ship
ˈsensərˌSHip/
noun
  1. the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts.
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You overlooked an important word in the definition. I bolded it for you.

Google is not a government. If you want to see real, actual censorship in action, read up on why Google left China. Isn't it odd that the article from the OP doesn't mention China at all?
 
DrLobotomy said:
Maybe we can get Steve to poll for a list of search terms and search engines, then do the research and show a cool diagram with the results.
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The vid in post #11 showed it happening across 3 different search engines. One of my biggest gripes with Google is that it seems like nearly every result is directed towards shopping for the searched term. I don't always need the first 4 pages to give me purchasing options.

It's pretty funny, I don't know how many people watch "Silicon Valley" on HBO, it's a Mike Judge ("Idiocracy") joint, but they addressed how one of the characters demanded that unflattering references to him be removed from the search results of their company's search engine - and how it was unethical to employ such a filter.

Food for thought?
 
evilsofa said:
You overlooked an important word in the definition. I bolded it for you.

Google is not a government. If you want to see real, actual censorship in action, read up on why Google left China. Isn't it odd that the article from the OP doesn't mention China at all?
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Wow. We really are arguing the definition of a word here....

I GET why you all think it ONLY applies to Governments but god damn guys.....the WORD is being used properly here. Taken from the second paragraph in Wikipedia:

"Governments, private organizations and individuals may engage in censorship."

Taken further, Wikipedia has a sub entry for 'internet censorship" where it reads:

"Internet censorship is the control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations at the behest of government, regulators, or on their own initiative."

Get over the definition already.
 
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Censorship is something that one can only do for ones self. Sometimes I want to censor my music search to the grindcore metal genre, so I select that option. Sometimes I want to look at all rock n roll. And sometimes I want to look through the whole store. You telling me what I want to look for is ridiculous. That is why a search engine has a filter. That is all fine and dandy as long as I am the only one engaging it and on my own filtering terms. Having a corp or gov. or joe blow down the street censoring isn't going to cut it.
 
Sonicks said:
"Internet censorship is the control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations at the behest of government, regulators, or on their own initiative."
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Technically Google can't do any of that. That's like thinking erasing amazon from popping up on google search somehow wipes them from the face of the internet. Only an organization like ICAN has that power to remove amazon from the dns servers, and even then you can bet other people will link their dns to amazon as a work around. It's kind of like how piratebay has been officially erased countless times, yet pops back up easily.

That's kind of the silly part in the argument. If you believe that the entire internet is only accessible through the google search portal, then you're gravely mistaken and willfully ignorant. It's popular because it's very well done, not because they have a monopoly.
 
I don't think official can only means government, but I can see why it can be taken that way.

Still, when you start to stifle people's speech, prepared to be criticized.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
Technically Google can't do any of that. That's like thinking erasing amazon from popping up on google search somehow wipes them from the face of the internet. Only an organization like ICAN has that power to remove amazon from the dns servers, and even then you can bet other people will link their dns to amazon as a work around. It's kind of like how piratebay has been officially erased countless times, yet pops back up easily.

That's kind of the silly part in the argument. If you believe that the entire internet is only accessible through the google search portal, then you're gravely mistaken and willfully ignorant. It's popular because it's very well done, not because they have a monopoly.
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Well that makes a lot more sense. I mistakenly ran with the way the author of this alarmist article used the word and found small pieces to support my incorrectness. Do'h!
 
Yea, they can't erase a website from existence... but they can make it seem nonexistent. Not the same, obviously. But it's kind of like a patent can't stop you from making money off of a product, but they can suppress it pretty hard.
 
You can voluntarily stop using them. It's called the free market for a reason.
 
For all the people who are ok with Google doing this, are you ok with Comcast slowing down Netflix?

Seems to me that this is very close to net neutrality.

Free and open web means good and bad.
 
Sonicks said:
I don't think there should be anything done about it to be honest. It's a company and it's their business model.

If someone doesn't agree with them they should stop using their service(s). Google didn't get as big as it is now on it's own.
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The problem is that Google code is literally EVERYWHERE and they have complete dominance over the flow of all searches for information period. They have too much farkin power and they must be regulated to allow free speech. The 1st Amendment, at least in the United States since it is our law, and google being a US company, does NOT have the right to infringe our bill of rights. The Bill of Rights does not stop at the private sector. Anyone can infringe your rights regardless of private or government and the Constitution prevents this and makes it illegal and there can be penalty of law for violating said rights. This is not about emotion or "I think". This is about black and white Rule by Law.
 
I don't see an issue here. Google simply searches for information that's "out there" and then indexes it and presents it for people to access if they choose to do so. If Google wants to censor the indexing results, that's well within their purview as the information presented by the indexes is actually theirs to do with as they please.

Sure we'll hear from both sides for and against about this forever but, that's my stance on it. Don't like what they're doing? Then either use a competing indexing search engine (which again is what this is all about really) or go find the info on your own the same way Google does:

Crawl for it.
 
DrLobotomy said:
Drink moar Kool-aid.
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Pretty much. People here are acting like a multi-billion dollar global corporation that controls roughly 75% of the search engine market (an effective monopoly) controlling the flow of information (which literally affects billions of people) is the same thing as their local restaurant not serving BLT sandwiches.
 
Sigh .... is all I can say. We have to lose essential liberty and many lives before the sheeple masses realize what they had all along, lost, and never realized until it was too late. Typical cycle of this idiot animal called the Homo Sapien.

Anyone purporting that the despotic control of the flow of "Public" information on the "Free" and "Public" Internet is ethically and morally sound is lacking in both down to their core or they have just not been awakened to their own ignorance or they work the system that intends to squash freedom of information exchange in order to gain power or money or both.

So sad where generation Millennial has taken us with their emotionally driven nonsense political stances based on zero experience with real life win loss decisions. Makes me wish the voting age was not until 30 years old.
 
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