14 DAY TRIAL // The past few days have boiled Google down to the point where an official statement was inevitable on the freedom of speech problem it's been confronting. It looks more like a civic lesson, punctuated with reasons why Google did this and that throughout its almost 9 years of existence. But civic lessons are not bad.
The main point of Rachel Whetstone's, Director of Global Communications and Public Affairs, EMEA blog is that Google cannot be held responsible for not censoring any and all material that might hurt a particular category of people; it can only take down material or refuse its presence in the search based on global and local laws. Child pornography is something that is illegal all over the world and thus shall never be found starting from any page related to Google, but other content like political extremism is a much more delicate issue to handle because different countries feel differently about it. For example, Whetstone says, "in Germany there's a ban on the promotion of Nazism -- so we remove Nazi content on products on Google.de (our domain for German users) products. Other countries' histories make commentary or criticism on certain topics especially sensitive. And still other countries believe that the best way to discredit extremists is to allow their arguments to be publicly exposed."
Because people can so easily express themselves on the Internet nowadays it is very difficult, the blog says, to keep the content available through search in check in order to try not to offend anyone that might stumble upon it by mistake. The wide variety of services that Google offers, Blogger, Groups, orkut and video for starters, are the most difficult to handle because the Mountain View based company hosts there other people's content that cannot be ultimately dismissed or changed whenever the search giant wants or needs to due to complaints because it is trying to offer a platform for free expression.
"Dealing with controversial content is one of the biggest challenges we face as a company. We don't pretend to have all the right answers or necessarily to get every judgment right. But we do try hard to think things through from first principles, to be as transparent as possible about how we make decisions, and to keep reviewing and debating our policies. After all, the right to disagree is a sign of a healthy society," Rachel Whetstone concludes.