Does Google Have a Right to Censor?
Jeffrey Rosen had an excellent article on “Google’s Gatekeepers” today, focusing on the company’s legal and policy decisions about what content to index. For example, after a group of videos mocked Turkey’s founder, Google’s deputy general counsel Nicole Wong decided that Google . . . would prevent access to videos that clearly violated Turkish law, but only in Turkey. . . [Then] a Turkish prosecutor made a sweeping demand: that Google block access to the offending videos throughout the world, to protect the rights and sensitivities of Turks living outside the country. Google refused, arguing that one nation’s government shouldn’t be able to set the limits of speech for Internet users worldwide. Unmoved, the Turkish government today continues to block access to YouTube in Turkey. China’s government, controlling access to a much larger market, may be getting more deference. (For visual evidence, just check out pages 9-10 of James Grimmelmann’s The Google Dilemma). Rosen’s article focuse
