Is Google Profiting from Child Pornography? - Why the Complaint Looks Fishy
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First, let’s start with Google’s reaction to the charges. Google spokesman Steve Langdon said in a statement to the Associated Press that “When we find or are made aware of any child pornography, we remove it from our products, including our search engine. We also report it to the appropriate law enforcement officials and fully cooperate with the law enforcement community to combat child pornography.” Langdon also pointed out that Google’s SafeSearch service for its search engine filters out adult content. And he added that the company’s advertising policy, “which is online, says specifically: advertising is not permitted for the promotion of child pornography or other non-consensual material.”
This is exactly what one would expect a search engine to do, given the laws. They are not required to actively watch to make sure they aren’t providing illegal content; indeed, that would call for a lot more hands and eyes than all of the search engines combined could afford to hire. But they are supposed to respond quickly when that kind of content is pointed out to them, which Google does. So Toback has a problem with Google acting legally?
It’s interesting to note, at this juncture, that Toback didn’t file the lawsuit against any of the other major search engines, such as Yahoo or MSN or even Ask.com. It is fair to ask why not. Google may attract more searches globally than anyone else, but Yahoo and MSN still field their share of search queries, and they also accept search engine advertising and sponsored links; indeed, Yahoo owns the company that pioneered sponsored link advertising!
Let’s also look at how the complaint defines “child pornography.” It’s a pretty standard practice for legal documents to define their most important terms, and I’d expect it to be defined here. The passage that comes closest to defining it is under point five in the complaint: “Rather, Defendant continues to put its economic gains ahead of the interests and well-being of America’s children and their care givers who are being bombarded with child pornography and other repulsive material that is illegal to distribute to children (collectively, ‘Child Pornography’).”
Now hold on there! What exactly is meant by lumping in “and other repulsive material that is illegal to distribute to children” with “child pornography”? By that definition, pornographic material that is perfectly legal to distribute to, and be viewed by, consenting adults, depicting sexual acts performed between consenting adults, would be considered child pornography. While I agree that those sorts of things should NOT be shown to children, they are not “child pornography” by any legal definition of that term. One wonders at the competence of the lawyer who created the filing.
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