Attorney Suggests Gov't Regulation of Google a Possibility
by Allie Martin
June 5, 2006
(AgapePress) - - An attorney with a prominent conservative Christian group says he is troubled by the recent announcement that the popular Internet search engine Google' has dumped news sites criticizing radical Islam.Last month Frank Salvato, owner of The New Media Journal, was informed by representatives of Google that his website's news page would be dropped as one of the search engine's news resources because of complaints regarding "hate speech." Google officials referenced three articles from the site that allegedly contained such speech directed at the Muslim religion. (See earlier article)
The chief counsel of the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy says Google's decision is troubling because of the company's influence on the Worldwide Web. Steve Crampton explains that the whole concept behind a search engine is that users are just looking for information -- and that the users will then take it from there.
"[Users are essentially saying] 'I'll do the decision-making -- the discriminating, if you will -- as to which articles I want to read and which ones I don't,'" says Crampton. "But when you retrieve only left-leaning articles or only articles that are favorable to the religion of Islam, you're not really providing news. You're providing a slanted view of the world."
And evidently Google provides its view to a major portion of American Internet users. According to the Nielsen/NetRatings report [PDF], half (50 percent) of all the Internet searches -- or approximately 2.65 billion searches -- conducted in the U.S. in April 2006 were carried out on Google. Yahoo! search and MSN search followed with 22 and 11 percent respectively. That makes Google, a private entity, one with vast influence -- and consequently, an argument might be made for government regulation, Crampton says.
"When you consider how large this entity has become, you start to get into a realm where an argument could be made that perhaps this entity now becomes sort of like a public utility to the extent that the people rely on Google and Google alone," the attorney states. "There may be an argument that the government can step in and regulate Google in a way that it couldn't otherwise regulate a private entity."
Still, Crampton encourages concerned Christians to contact Google and let them know of their outrage at the decision. Company officials did not respond to an interview request.
Allie Martin, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
