Google’s Gatekeepers

A sober­ing piece by law pro­fes­sor Jef­frey Rosen about the crit­i­cal and reluc­tant role that Google’s cor­po­rate gate­keep­ers play in decid­ing what we can and can­not see as it nav­i­gates the ter­ri­tory between pro­vid­ing neu­tral plat­form for free speech and a com­pany in the media and adver­tis­ing business:

“Right now, we’re trust­ing Google because it’s good, but of course, we run the risk that the day will come when Google goes bad,” [law pro­fes­sor Tim] Wu told me. In his view, that day might come when Google allowed its auto­mated Web crawlers, or search bots, to be used for law-enforcement and national-security pur­poses. “Under pres­sure to fight ter­ror­ism or to pacify repres­sive gov­ern­ments, Google could track every­thing we’ve searched for, every­thing we’re writ­ing on gmail, every­thing we’re writ­ing on Google docs, to fig­ure out who we are and what we do,” he said. “It would make the Inter­net a much scarier place for free expres­sion.” The ques­tion of free speech online isn’t just about what a com­pany like Google lets us read or see; it’s also about what it does with what we write, search and view.