A Long Island politician filed a 16-page complaint earlier this month accusing Google of profiting from child pornography. This filing is wrong in so many ways, not the least of them being that it reads more like a publicity stunt. Read on to find out why the charges won't stand up in court.
There are few topics more likely to inspire an emotional reaction than child pornography, and rightly so. It shatters lives and traumatizes the helpless, sometimes beyond the point of recovery. Those who have been so injured often repeat the cycle of abuse on the next generation, unless there is professional intervention. Even then, the percentage of abusers who can be considered “cured” after undergoing treatment, never to molest children again, is mournfully low.
But this is part of the reason that charges leveled against Google by a New York politician have excited so much comment. It is deeply disturbing to think that the wildly popular search engine could be profiting from something as evil as child pornography. If these charges are true, then the filing is one tar-covered brush Google might never recover from. As you will see, however, that is an extremely big “if.” Indeed, Jeffrey Toback, the politician who filed the charges, would be well-advised to not make such serious charges so lightly, lest he turn public opinion against himself – hardly something that someone who works in an elected office would want to do.
Toback, a member of the Nassau County Legislature, filed the 16-page complaint against Google early this month in the state Supreme Court in Mineola. He filed it as a private citizen, using no county funds. The lawsuit accuses Google of making “its money, in part, by facilitating deviant criminals in the procurement, transfer and marketing of illicit and patently illegal material, including child pornography and other obscenity that is banned under federal and state law.” The gist of Toback’s complaint seems to be that, not only can users find child pornography by searching on Google, but that child pornographers can use Google’s AdWords system to pay for sponsored links to their sites when certain keywords are put into the search engine. Hence, by accepting payment for such ads, Google is profiting from child pornography.
The filing continues in the kind of inflated language one is far more likely to see in a public relations document or a press release than in a legal brief. “Simply put, Defendant is the largest and most efficient facilitator and distributor of Child Pornography in the world. Defendant has the technological and operational resources to curtail, if not eradicate, Child Pornography. However, Defendant has no desire to do so not because it is a defender of ‘free speech’ and ‘privacy rights’ on the Internet but, rather, because Child Pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry that has become an obscenely profitable and integral part of Defendant’s business model.”
Those are serious charges indeed. To take it down to brass tacks, the suit charges Google with negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Unfortunately for Toback, however, these charges won’t stand up for a second in a court of law. I’ll explain why in just a moment.
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