Parliament is more than willing to create laws that would force Google to censor itself

Mar 28, 2012 13:00 GMT  ·  By

British authorities are continuing to push Google and other web companies to start censoring content they don't want getting out. At the heart of the problem are the so-called "media injunctions," a British invention that enables celebrities to ask courts to silence the press.

This worked fine when "the press" was easily definable, but in a world where everyone has a blog or a Twitter account, enforcing the law has proven problematic, to say the least.

Seeing as the court couldn't order tens of thousands of people to stop tweeting celebrities' embarrassing secrets, authorities believe it should be Twitter's responsibility to do so.

The same goes for Google that indexes pages revealing the dirty secrets celebrities would rather keep out of the public's eye.

Currently, those that are offended by various websites unveiling things that courts have deemed to be a privacy violation, have to submit links to Google which removes them one by one.

This is a futile exercise as you can imagine. It would be much simple if Google magically figured out which websites hosted the content in question and simply removed the links from its results.

The websites would still be there, but who would ever know if Google didn't point to them. Or at least, that seems to be the popular view.

A report (PDF) by a Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions from the British parliament made it clear that it doesn't care how Google does it, but it wants it done.

"Google and other search engines should take steps to ensure that their websites are not used as vehicles to breach the law and should actively develop and use such technology," the committee said. "We recommend that if legislation is necessary to require them to do so it should be introduced."

Google, unsurprisingly, is unfazed and is sticking to its guns. "Requiring search engines to screen the content of their web pages would be like asking phone companies to listen in on every call made across their networks for potentially suspicious activity," it said in a statement.

"Google already remove specific pages deemed unlawful by the courts. We have a number of simple tools anyone can use to report such content, which we then remove from our index," it added.