Google vs. government
I’ve only just got around to reading the complete response by Google to the US Department of Justice’s demand for data. While interesting, the data requested certainly doesn’t appear to be particularly useful in the government’s purported aim to understand whether self-regulation is sufficient to protect minors from unsavoury content.
The introduction can be found here, while the full submission, an interesting 25-page PDF, is here.
Professor Phillip Stark, who I believe is the government’s statistician responsible for this initiative, gets an absolute pasting, while the government comes across as being similarly ill-informed in its request.
The government suggests that by gaining access to a week’s worth of Google queries, along with the URLs of Google’s entire index (along with similar data from other leading search engines), it will be able to test its hypothesis. Google’s argument to the contrary is compelling and condescending – it seems that the level of emotion increases as the submission evolves.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out, although I feel that Google’s argument would have been even stronger if it had steered clear of the emotion, even if their approach makes for more compelling reading.
Comments
Leave a Reply