« Support a rare thing - a good Congressional bill | Main | Under no means should you smoke ‘em if you got ‘em »
Site:www.google.com “good news, bad news”
Google got some good news on Friday in its current battle against the Department of Justice. The government had subpoenaed billions of URLs and individual user search queries, and Google was fighting the need to comply with this subpoena. The federal judge overseeing the case ruled that Google did not have to turn over any individual search queries to the government, and that it only had to supply 50,000 URLs rather than the requested billions. Google is obviously very pleased by this, interpreting the ruling as meaning “that neither the government nor anybody else has carte blanche when demanding data from internet companies.”
But Friday wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops for Google, as another disgruntled site has filed a lawsuit for being blacklisted from Google’s search rankings. The suit, brought by a website which provides information about children, is seeking to have its case turned into a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of all sites that have been blacklisted since 2001. Google has faced similar lawsuits in the past - for example, a company once sued Google after its search ranking fell, but the case was dismissed after Google successfully argued that its search formula was protected free speech. This time, it’s the company suing Google who is claiming speech violations, arguing that Google is wrongfully punishing these blacklisted sites, reducing their traffic and limiting their speech. In addition, the company argues that Google has become an essential part of internet business, and its actions of pulling websites from the listings without any warning causes those websites significant harm. To avoid this harm, the company argues, there should be more transparency and openness in Google’s operations, particularly its tightlipped search and sorting algorithms.
Seem to me that this lawsuit is an utter clunker. The free speech argument is a non-starter, since the right of free speech in the First Amendment is about the fact that the government can’t limit your expression. Doesn’t say anything about non-public entities. And the notion that Google is an essential part of internet business may be true, but there’s no legal ground for taking the jump that it must therefore operate differently then other businesses and expose protected trade secrets. I’m as skeptical as the next guy of companies that get too big for their britches (which Google is getting awfully close too), and I do think Google should give companies warnings before kicking them out of the search listings, but that doesn’t mean you can just bring the hammer down on them, wily nily. My suggestion to these blacklisted sites is that maybe they should stop doing stuff that gets you blacklisted. How ‘bout that?
