Saturday, January 21, 2006

In Google vs Government, It’s Not About Child Porn

It’s interesting to see how many news sources mistakenly report that the current government vs Google case is about child porn. It’s not. If anything, it’s about children looking at pornography – i.e. webmasters not ensuring their sites are sufficiently blocking minors from viewing harmful content. Or more specifically, it’s about a proposed law requiring those sites to restrict access to minors, the Child Online Protection Act, which just didn’t get through in the past, and which the Bush administration now wants to revive (and for that reason, asked different search engines to hand over search logs and indexed URLs to prove the law is needed).

I wrote to the author of the original article at the Mercury News while preparing and editing my first blog post on this, realizing this isn’t about child porn – indeed the error is quick to make, and I was confused too at first – but the Merc’s error was never corrected. From there, it spread like wildfire into blogs and mainstream news sources alike. Following are some of the statements that are making their rounds (my emphasis):

“The Justice Department is asking Internet search giant Google to turn over search records in an effort to defend a child pornography law”

– CNN

“The company has refused to turn over the data, which the Bush Administration claims it will use in its fight against child pornography.”

– Forbes

“The US Department of Justice wants the information to help it to establish how much child pornography is available on the internet”

– Times Online

“However, the Supreme Court invited the government to either come up with a less drastic version of the law or go to trial to prove that the statute does not violate the First Amendment and is the only viable way to combat child porn.”

– Mercury News

“The government doesnt need Googles data to go after child porn (KP) sites.”

– Make You Go Hmm.com

“The Supreme Court invited the government to either come up with a less drastic version of the law or go to trial to prove that the statute does not violate the First Amendment and is the only viable way to combat child porn.”

– Slashdot (itself citing Mercury News)

“Trolling through two month’s worth of random results at the world’s leading search engine, as the government’s original subpoena requested, presumably would give Justice Department investigators a good read on what percentage of those searches were for child porn.”

– MarketWatch

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