RE: An Actual Knock at the Door?

I have several points, not all of which relate specifically to this comment, but to the overall conversation. My response to the Google post in general comes last.

First, on FOX's slant, I'd refer everbody to this study by the progam on international policy attitudes, which shows that people who get most of their news from FOX are significantly more likely to have certain misperceptions about the war in Iraq than those who watch CNN, and far more likely than those who get most of their news from NPR or PBS. Now, there are almost certainly other factors involved there, but I do think the results say something about FOX. You might be right about their actual news coverage, as distinguished from their punditry, but really I think the key problem with the channel is precisely that coverage makes up a very small part of what they broadcast, and punditry (e.g. Hannity or O'Reily) makes up the lion's share.

Second, I think it's worth pointing out that at least some of what Google apparently objected to was not simply criticism of Islam. I didn't go look at all the stories, but I did look at several; one of the posts Google apparently had an issue with on MichNews contains the following:

That's not criticism, that's offensive, stupid bigotry. I don't think that fact actually has any bearing on the rightness or wrongness on Google's action, which I'll get to in a second, but I think we should be clear that this isn't "news" in any meaningful sense, nor is it, at least in some cases, merely critical.

Finally, and more to the point, as I've already suggested I don't think that the content of the posts has much to do with whether Google should be picking and choosing. The question we have to ask, given Google's predominance, is whether it's their prerogative any longer to decide to take an action like this. If Google becomes, even by default, the way that people find information online, then their decision to remove these sources from their results is in effect a decision to deny, or at least limit, access to certain kinds and certain sources of information. The fact that some of what these sites say about particular issues is offensive (and, as the above quote demonstrates, it is) doesn't change the fact that removing them from results impacts only one side of the political spectrum in practice, if not by intent, and that's a problem.

I don't accept the category of "hate speech," as I think it forces us to make decisions we're not equipped to make about the intent of the speaker and the impact of what's said, and I think it's an imposition of free speech that we can't afford to make. The question we have to find an answer to now is whether Google (a) is simply a private company providing a service for profit, and thus entitled to make whatever calls it sees fit in order to maximize that profit– including removing content it thinks will offend its customers– or (b) has, by virtue of market dominance, become a de facto public service that has a responsibility to provide fair and equal access to information, regardless of slant. And that's a question that's much more complicated than any sort of "left vs. right" issues.