It's not just Google

Readers here will be aware that I oppose all political censorship. And putting people in jail for holocaust denial seems a particularly egregious case of political censorship to me. Quite aside from any principles involved, it seems to me that political censorship is just plain dangerous. Once you allow it, you never know where it will end up.

And net censorship is well advanced. Google is now well-known for it (there is another example of their evil ways here) but one can argue that as long as they are not breaking any law, a private company can do as it likes. Seeing that there are already myriads of regulations that businesses have to obey in order to protect the public, however, another law to protect the public from information censorship by semi-monopolists like Google might not be such a bad idea.

One hopes, however, that the market will solve the problem without the need for government intervention. The evil practices of Google may simply create a market for another more comprehensive search facility. So far, however, it does not seem to be happening. There seem to be certain sites or sections of sites which are off limits to ALL search engines.

And -- you guessed it -- sites that engage in holocaust denial seem to be an example of that. I tried to find this article using MSN search, Google and Clusty.com -- the three engines that usually give me the best results. No luck -- even though the site concerned is quite a prominent far-Right site and even though the article has been up for a month -- plenty of time for the search crawlers to find it.

Since this seems to have come about voluntarily, imagine what might happen to anything but the tamest conservative sites if a future Democrat incumbent in the White House saw fit to exert a little gentle "pressure" on the search companies. A threat of prosecution for promoting "hate speech" should do the trick.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Page. Email me (John Ray) here.)

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