Google Briefly Punishes Oracle by Removal from Google Search (ipwatchdog.com) |
Google Briefly Punishes Oracle by Removal from Google Search (ipwatchdog.com) |
And this guy falls for it, even though it's pretty much spelled out in the search results shown what is going on.
Even so, I found the following remark interesting:
"It seems to me that removing Oracle from the Google search database would be an intentional tort and actionable under a variety of unfair business practice theories. Whether Google wants to admit it or not their search engine has become something of a public facility. As a result, arbitrarily and capriciously denying any individual or company access smacks of censorship and a high handedness that would result in the unilateral selection of winners and losers. With the power of Google they cannot be allowed to do something like this because if they can do it to Oracle they could do it to me or you or many others who would have little recourse."
I wonder if that is true? If Google would actually decide to remove company X or word Y from their search results, would that be considered censorship under the law? Would it be illegal? One could argue that it's their data and they can show it, or not show it, whichever way they want.
edit: ah, this is the case:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/belgian-pape...
Google lost a copyright battle against some Belgian newspapers for news.google.be. So they delisted ALL pages from those papers.
"When Google lost the case, it not only pulled the stories from the News archive and stopped indexing them, but it yanked the papers from its main index. Apparently, this wasn't good for business, and the papers soon worked out a deal to get back in the index while remaining out of Google News."
An example to the others, indeed.