http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/google/
Localized Google search result exclusions
Statement of issues and call for data
Jonathan Zittrain* and Benjamin Edelman** - Berkman Center for
Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
The authors are studying exclusions from search engine search results,
and have found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the
French google.fr and German
google.de compared with google.com. Learn more about the situation and
context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites
suspected to be excluded.
Introduction
The authors are studying Internet filtering worldwide, primarily
in the context of affirmative actions by governments to restrict
the sites viewed by their respective
users. We are also interested in requests or demands to private
parties that they assist in preventing particular citizens'
exposure to locally unwanted or illicit data
or activities. A well-known example is the attempt by the French
judiciary, acting on complaint of a French NGO, to prevent those
on French territory from viewing
Yahoo auctions that include the display of Nazi memorabilia, and
Yahoo's response.
Another developing set of examples, commonly worked more through
informal arrangements and understandings rather than lawsuits,
relates to search engines.
Though search engines cannot prevent direct access to a site of
interest, an exclusion from a search engine may nonetheless have a
similar effect on a site's
ability to reach its intended visitors. Private parties have
sought to have search results omitted whose corresponding sites
allegedly infringe copyright or other
rights. For example, the Church of Scientology, invoking the "safe
harbor" provisions of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
convinced Google to remove
references to certain web pages critical of the religion and
allegedly containing copyrighted material; another example may be
found with the Internet Archive's
policy of possibly (but not necessarily) acceding to requests to
remove its caches of a given Web site should the site's authors
(or perhaps others) object on the
basis of copyright infringement. While a few removals may be
widely publicized by third parties noticing the exclusions (as in
the case of the Church of Scientology
requests), most others are systemically unknown, and we know of no
direct way to determine a full list of all sites or pages excluded
from country-specific versions
of Google (or from archive.org or from other web services and
search engine results). We have asked for Google's assistance in
this matter, since they'd be in a
position to directly reveal the list of filtered material; we are
told the request is under consideration. Google does notify the
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse of
DMCA-based requests for removals, which are then posted on the
Chilling Effects site.
The policy for removals based on government invocation of local
laws remains itself somewhat shrouded. For example, while Google's
terms of service explains
that it removes search results in response to DMCA notifications
and sets forth some other situations where Google might remove
search results, there is no
mention of government-mandated (or -requested) removals, though
there is mention of the prospect in at least one apparent message
from Google support staff.
This may well be due to the fact that there are no industry "best
practices" or other easy means of determining an ideal course of
action by search engines when
confronted with requests or demands for exclusions grounded in
part in alleged legal requirements.
The authors are currently seeking to document differences between
results generated at google.com and those at google.fr and
google.de, Google's
counterparts intended for French and German
audiences. Specifically, we have noticed that while google.fr and
google.de use google.com's database
concordance of 2,469,940,685 web pages (Google's count as of
Oct. 20, 2002), the French and German sites seem to screen search
results corresponding to
sites with content that might be sensitive or illegal in the
respective countries. Such filtering by Google at the technical
level on the basis of threatened or implied
legal liability or responsibility is wholly separate from
national, third-party interception and filtering of Google
searches and results pages, as in the September
2002 replacement of google.com with other search engines in China
(see documentation and screenshots) and subsequent unfolding
restrictions on certain
Google searches in China.
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