Is Google Profiting from Child Pornography? - More Fishiness
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As Eric Goldman points out in his blog, the complaint “takes numerous gratuitous shots at Google, including swipes for doing business in China and using user data to target ads.” It does this by pointing out that Google apparently has the technical expertise to filter out searches for words like “democracy” for searchers in China, in accordance with the Chinese government’s demands, so it is presumably capable of filtering out and perhaps even eradicating child pornography. Unfortunately for Toback, it isn’t just a matter of filtering out a few simple terms, or child pornography would have been wiped out a long time ago.
This reminds me very much of the old “They can put a man on the moon, why can’t they (insert your favorite complaint here)?” kinds of arguments. That particular issue was solved by throwing lots of money and brains at the problem; that doesn’t always work. And usually the problem cited in comparison is of a different nature, as in this case. Not meaning to sound catty, but it might be too much to expect Toback to understand this, given that he only recently learned that Google has a SafeSearch feature. That’s something any responsible parent that allows his children to search on the Internet really ought to know about.
Now let’s move from the tone of the complaint to its actual arguments. Looking at point 18 of the complaint, it describes Google’s business model as being the same as a mall owner, and compares the searchers to “shoppers” and advertisers to “tenants.” Say what? Stay with me on this; it appears that this description is being used in order to permit the argument that Google is supposed to police its advertisers in the same way that a mall owner is supposed to police the businesses that are its tenants. But Google is not a mall owner, not even for purposes of analogy. To quote Goldman again, whoever drafted the complaint doesn’t “understand the difference between merchants and the media that distribute advertising for them.”
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