14 DAY TRIAL // Google has always stood up for internet freedom. It wants all traffic to be treated equally and wants access to be universal and indiscriminate. That is, unless it's in the company's interest to forget about these things once in a while.
But it has owned up to some of those claims, it moved out of China, partly because of the censorship there. Mostly because its infrastructure was infiltrated by China-backed hackers and if there's one thing that Google hates more than evil governments is anything that makes its engineers look bad.
Now though Google is picking up another fight, one that would threaten the internet as we know it in countries we care much more about than China, the US and the UK.
At a Google conference in London, former CEO, current chairman and 'ambassador' Eric Schmidt talked about the dangers of anti-piracy legislation that could end up being used as a tool against free speech and legal web services.
Specifically, Schmidt referred to the PROTECT IP Act now being cooked up, with surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, little resistance, in the US. The law would grant copyright holders new means and powers to block sites or even censor search results.
Since he was in the UK, he was also referring to the Digital Economy Act, which comes with some similar provisions. He said that Google is against any solution that interferes with the foundation of the internet, in this case DNS servers which connect users to the websites they're trying to find.
"I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems," he said, according to The Guardian.
"So, 'let's whack off the DNS'. Okay, that seems like an appealing solution but it sets a very bad precedent because now another country will say 'I don't like free speech so I'll whack off all those DNSs' – that country would be China," he added.
He was unequivocal about Google's position on this. Not only would the company criticize such a move, it will fight it in court.
"If there is a law that requires DNSs to do X and it's passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it," he said.
It's nice to hear big web companies talking about this and saying that they will fight such legislation that have serious repercussions on free speech. But Google has collaborated with major copyright holders in the past to censor search suggestions, removing terms such as BitTorrent.
At the time it was trying to reach deals with the music industry for a cloud music service and also with major Hollywood studios for content to be rented on YouTube and Android devices. Despite the censorship, negotiations with the music labels still failed.