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Google stands its ground

Enter the words "sellout" and "betrayal" into an Internet search engine and the names America Online, Yahoo and MSN should pop up. These online service companies cooperated with a federal government examination of the ways their customers navigate the Internet. Only the giant search engine company Google put up a fight.

The Justice Department had said it needs to obtain huge amounts of data from online providers to use as part of its defense of the Child Online Protection Act. The law, passed in 1998, imposes criminal penalties on people who create and maintain Web sites that include material deemed harmful to minors - an extremely vague and broad standard that has the potential of sanitizing and censoring the Internet. All sorts of Web-based content providers including Salon.com believe they would be adversely affected by the law.

Since its passage, the law has been challenged on First Amendment grounds and an injunction has kept it from going into effect. The case is now before a district court that will determine whether filtering software is more effective than a criminal law in protecting minors from objectionable material. (Filtering software applies to all content, including foreign sources, as opposed to a domestic law.)

The department has the job of trying to defend the law and claims to need Google's records "to estimate how often Web users encounter harmful-to-minor materials in the course of their searches and to measure the effectiveness of filtering software in screening that material."

There is no reason the department can't conduct its own tests. Online service providers and search engines are not an arm of the government and shouldn't have to comply with requests for massive amounts of data just so the department can go poking around and see what it finds. A subpoena is appropriate when government lawyers are seeking specific evidence, not for a fishing expedition.

The original subpoena to Google demanded an entire week of search requests - potentially billions of records, as well as a million randomly selected Web addresses that are part of its index. Google has been resisting the department's demands since August and the issue was argued last month in federal court. Since then, the department significantly reduced its demands, no doubt due to Google's strong defense. District Court Judge James Ware has indicated that in light of the modification, he is disposed to grant the government at least part of what it is asking for. But this should be viewed as a win for Google and its customers.

While the department argued that privacy isn't a concern because it was not asking for identifying information, so a specific query could not be linked to any individual, Google was right to claim that there was still a looming customer privacy issue. If Google appears eager to cooperate with broad government demands for data, as were the other major online service providers, customers may worry about the security of their own information. Google's databases hold highly sensitive data on where individuals go on the Internet, and the continued growth of its service depends on the trust of the public.

The records that online service providers and search engines hold are not treasure troves for the government to dig through. Only a narrow and focused demand for essential information should be entertained by the courts.

[Last modified March 20, 2006, 00:36:17]