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Localized Google Exclusions
posted by mpawlo on Thursday October 24, @03:40AM
from the trusted-search-engines dept.
Censorship edelman writes "Professor Jonathan Zittrain and I are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de.

Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. More below:


This work continues our study of Internet filtering in countries worldwide. To date, this work has focused on filtering in the context of affirmative actions by governments to restrict the sites viewed by their respective users. However, we are also interested in requests or demands to private parties that they assist in preventing particular citizens' exposure to locally unwanted or illicit data or activities. Search engines are increasingly the targets of such requests, and in our recent work we have attempted to begin to document some of the specific sites filtered -- reluctantly, we gather! -- by the French and German versions of Google.

As in our prior testing of Internet filtering China and Saudi Arabia, there exists no publicly available master list of blocked sites. To assemble something approaching such a list, we have found ways to remotely test "twenty questions" style, asking about thousands of individual web servers.

To help us broaden the number and types of servers tested and to provide the general public a means of finding out whether particular pages of interest are filtered, we have created a web site at which users can see whether a given site is excluded from French or German search results. We'll track all requests and report the results in our forthcoming report about exclusions from Google. We're eager to see whether such "open source research" will end up finding a substantial number of blocked sites that, despite our best efforts, we did not know about and therefore ask about ourselves.

We have also prepared a listing of 100+ sites filtered in France and/or Germany, as well as screen-shots and a system by which interested users can confirm, using their own browsers and their own Internet connections, the reported divergence between results on google.com versus google.fr and google.de.

See initial results, test additional sites, and contribute suggestions via
   http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/fil tering/google.


Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School"

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    Localized Google Exclusions | Login/Create an Account | Top | 6 comments | Search Discussion
    Threshold:
    The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
    Reason note on Google exclusions report (Score:2)
    by Seth Finkelstein (sethfNO@SPAMsethf.com) on Thursday October 24, @07:43AM (#429)
    User #31 Info | http://sethf.com/
    I've written a note on the reasons for some of these exclusions, at
    http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000053. html

    In discussing the data, the authors state:

    Many such sites seem to offer Neo-Nazi, white supremacy, or other content objectionable or illegal in France and Germany, though other affected sites are more difficult to cleanly categorize.

    The purpose of this note is to point out that one reason for certain sites being affected, is that they were formerly in such an objectionable category. Even though the domain has changed owners since then, they apparently remained blacklisted.

    -- [sethf.com]Seth Finkelstein [sethf.com] (Anticensorware Investigations [sethf.com])

    How-it-works note on Google exclusions report (Score:2)
    by Seth Finkelstein (sethfNO@SPAMsethf.com) on Thursday October 24, @10:04AM (#430)
    User #31 Info | http://sethf.com/
    've written a note describing how the exclusions actually work, at
    http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000054. html [sethf.com]

    In discussing results, they conjecture:

    The implication of these results -- confirmed in our subsequent searches on google.com versus google.fr and .de for the terms at issue -- is that the French and German versions of Google simply omit search results from the sites excluded from their respective versions of Google.

    This implication can be refined and clearly demonstrated by observation of more sophisticated searching. ... Thus, the restrictions appear to be implemented as a post-processing step using very simple patterns of prohibited results.

    - Seth Finkelstein [sethf.com] (Anticensorware Investigations [sethf.com])

    Slashdot discussion (Score:1)
    by edelman on Thursday October 24, @12:56PM (#431)
    User #4 Info | http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/edelman.html
    See also a surprisingly extensive Slashdot discussion [slashdot.org] (514 comments so far).

    Ben

    Link to the complaint itself is down (Score:1)
    by dave34733 ({david.browde} {at} {browdelaw.com}) on Friday October 25, @08:42AM (#433)
    User #536 Info | http://www.browdelaw.com/
    FWIW, the link to your complaint off the page http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/edelma n-v-n2h2/ - which links to an ACLU page - is down. However, the motion to dismiss papers are available. Is the complaint posted elsewhere?
    Fixed (Score:1)
    by edelman on Monday October 28, @08:32AM (#437)
    User #4 Info | http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/edelman.html
    The links are now fixed. (An "upgrade" to the ACLU site unfortunately had the effect of breaking links to most [all?] pages on the site.)

    The site at issue is Edelman v. N2H2 [harvard.edu], detailing the research I seek to perform on a controversial Internet blocking program and the assistance I seek from a court in order to do so without fear of prosecution.

    Ben Edelman [harvard.edu]

    Strange... (Score:1)
    by Tim on Saturday October 26, @03:28PM (#434)
    User #169 Info
    Whatever one may think of censorship, Google is only obeying French and German law. It's French and German law that ban certain Web sites as inciting hatred, etc.

    I know that sometimes sites remain excluded even after their content has changed, and that Google doesn't tell you when results have been omitted. But, hey, Google's just a private business doing the best it can.

    In fact, from a purely legal point of view, they may not be doing enough! Remenber the case of the Nazi auctions on Yahoo? The very fact that www.google.com (with Nazi etc. sites uncensored) is accessible from France puts Google at risk of liability. That is, if there can be liability under such circumstances for a mere hyperlink -- and I don't believe that this has ever been decided.

    The point is: if there is no possible liability, then there is no need for censorship; but if there is a possibility of liability, the censorship is so trivial to circumvent that they may as well not bother -- unless they censor www.google.com too.

    I'm not going to argue here about the wisdom of allowing free speech to racists, Holocaust deniers and the like. The point is that France and the USA (the latter being Google's home country) have very different policies on this matter. In the pre-Internet age, different standards in different countries were entirely workable....

    Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition. - Isaac Asimov

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