Friday, June 11, 2004

New Google Censorship

Yet another web site is shielded from German visitors as the Nazi page of Gary Lauck has been removed from Google.de.

If you are visiting Google from the USA or another country, entering Gary Lauck will return www.nazi-lauck-nsdapao.com as first site.
The same search in Germany however will not list this page at all and show an Encyclopaedia entry instead. However even clicking on the Google.com result, the Nazi page from a US server is not shown in Germany. Instead, one can see the following text in German (my translation):

“Dear User!

You tried to access the pages www.nazi-lauck-nsdapao.com or www.stormfront.org*. (...)
Your Internet Service Provider has been asked to cut you off from above sites.”

*Stomrfront.org is another site censored in Google.de.

One way for me to see this Nazi site is to translate it with Altavista. Certainly there are other ways for me to do that. I’m not personally interested in this site’s content. But what would I do if I would like to research what Gary Lauck and other Nazis are up to on the Web, and I’m located in Germany? I would effectively be blind to what’s going on.

Great job Google in helping out censorship wherever you can by respecting state laws. I guess it makes sense because you are not responsible for politics, and we should start figuring out how to fight censorship by voting for better politicians. One thing though to enhance usability – whenever Germans enter Stormfront or Gary Lauck into your search engine, please display a little burned book icon to indicate the peculiar lack of results.

New Google Censorship by Philipp Lenssen

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