Rou

Everyone loves Google. Honestly, from the first moment I saw the search engine's simplistic front page; I knew there was goodness there. The fact that it's highly accurate just sweetened the deal.

Now, Google has faced a number of criticisms. Privacy concerns. Financial shenanigans during their IPO. Other little missteps from time to time.

However, the company does tend to live up to it’s motto: You can make money without doing evil.

Now, recently Google made an announcement. It said it was going to get into a fight with the Federal government. WHA? But why?

It turns out the Department of Justice is a little bit sore. You see, the Supreme Court smacked them down a little while ago saying that Child Online Protection Act was a tiny bit unconstitutional. Silly thing that. It was an effort to protect children from being able to find porn online. Specifically the court said the that “filtering’s superiority to COPA is confirmed by the explicit findings of the Commission on Child Online Protection, which Congress created to evaluate the relative merits of different means of restricting minors' ability to gain access to harmful materials on the internet”. Basically, if parents want to block access to such things, there are already ample ways to do it without federal regulation. Oh, and this law also made things like breast exam information and Greek statues illegal without some form of adult authentication. A+ law, really. Oy.

Well, DOJ has never been one to worry about things like the SCOTUS’s opinion. So, it’s fighting it out. But it needs help. So, it issued subpoenas to MSN, Yahoo, AOL, and Google. It wanted a whole bunch of data. Search terms were recorded over specific time periods. The results of those searches. And a number of other minor details.

Now, three of these company’s bend over and let DOJ take them like a Thai street walker. Google responded by saying no. DOJ had to look up what no meant, but once they did, they were really mad. How dare someone deny them anything?

So, it got a court order demanding that Google help them. At this point, I asked myself: “Why should a private company provide the government with data for no reason?” Google isn’t involved in the case. It’s not a criminal investigation, it’s just a court proceeding on the basis of a lawsuit that DOJ has already lost. If they want the data, hire someone to do your research for you. Private companies are not there to service DOJ lawsuits. What did the government want the data for anyway?

Well, you see, it wanted to prove that the law it tried to pass would be better than Net Nanny-type filters. However, I’m totally lost on how this request gets them to that point. I mean, if you want to prove that, the obvious way to do it is to take a PC with a filter and try to search the internet. Then, take a PC configured to follow COPA guidelines and run the same searches. Repeat as needed. Take results and compare.

The worst part is that the data isn’t even useful. It wouldn’t give the feds the age of the surfer, just the terms search on. Which means that it doesn’t demonstrate how COPA is better than filters. It also doesn’t include ranking info. So if the 500th hit for toothpaste is porn, the government wouldn’t see the difference between that hit and Colgate’s site. Once again, not useful data.

What they asked for from Google will cost Google a lot of money to produce, will give away information about the infrastructure Google’s search engine, and will potentially give up a lot of data about what you or I do online. Not specifically, but it will hand over a lot of info to the government that I don’t much think I feel they should be able to just demand. If they want it, hire someone to do your research for you. Private companies are not there to service DOJ lawsuits.

So to sum up this long winded rant, I say the following: Good job Google. Kick some DOJ ass. AOL, MSN, and Yahoo can go suck a cock for giving the info without even thinking about it. The DOJ should shut the fuck up and let the law go; SCOTUS said it sucks, get over it. And Congress…. die in a fire for writing the damn thing.