Despite this action, Google remains commited to maintain as full an index as possible, and claims to have carried out this censorship in response to legal obligations not to publish incediary material in these countries.Absent from Google's French and German listings are sites that are anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, or related to white-supremacy. Also censored is Jesus-is-lord.com, a fundamentalist Christian site.
Although the sites have been removed from the indexes of goolge.de and google.fr, they remain in the google.com index.
"To avoid legal liability, we remove sites from Google.de search results pages that may conflict with German law," said Google spokesman Nate Tyler. Under German law, Holocaust denials, and other similar extreme right wing views are considered to incite racial hatred, and are therefore illegal by default. In fact, the German government orders German ISP to block access to US sites that post this kind of content.
"We've been dealing with this for quite a few years," said Don Black, who runs right-wing US site Stormfront. "The German police agencies seem obsessed with Stormfront even though we're not focussed on any German language material. Google is trying to conform to their outrageous laws, so there's really nothing we can do about it. It's really a French and German issue rather than a Google issue."
"Google may not only have the legal right to (delete listings), they may have the legal obligation to do it," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program and a co-founder of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign."Over the long term, this will become a significant issue on the Net," Steinhardt said. "There's a wide variety of laws around the world prohibiting different forms of speech. You can imagine what the Chinese government prohibits versus what the French government prohibits versus what the US government prohibits."
