Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Google, MSN and Yahoo received subpoenas to turn lots of data over to US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales et al. as the US Government prepares to defend the concept that a criminal statute is required to protect children from online 'indecent material', and that filtering software is not as good a solution as a criminal deterrent.
MSN and Yahoo have already moved to turn over the goods:
1) All URLs that are available to be located through a query on your company's search engine as of July 31, 20052) All queries that have been entered on your company's search engine between June 1, 2005 and July 31, 2005 inclusive.
Even after negotiating a random sampling of 1M URLs from its index and one week's search queries, Google adamantly refuses to turn over the data.
My question: It seems to me that the government's goal would be met with the data from the two engines that are complying. The gov't claims that they need G's data because G is the market leader, but don't Y and M cover most of the same territory?
I don't think G needs to nor should comply.
Their spokesman claims that googles refusal is "primarily a reflection of their left wing politics" ..
