Searching for freedom
It's not often Google teams up with the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft, but facing new legislation by a Republican lawmaker to restrict the search giants' ability to pander to repressive regimes that censor the Internet, that's just what's happened.
Republican representative, Chris Smith, has long been lobbying for the "Global Online Freedom Act of 2009," an ambitious bill which hopes to monitor and prevent US firms from helping oppressive regimes filter the Web, even if that means losing business in populous countries like China.
The bill would also stop US companies from being able to hand over user information to foreign governments for anything other than "legitimate law enforcement purposes."
In cases where a US search engine is being asked to give out user information to authorities, the bill wants the US Attorney General to step in and forbid the company from complying, putting it somewhere between a rock and a hard place in the country it was operating in.
The developing world, especially countries like China, represent massive opportunities for companies like Google, which has, in the past, acquiesced to government requests and self-censored its search services.
In 2006 Google even started censoring results on pro-democracy searches and information on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989.
To silence its critics, Google has argued that some search results are better than no search results and therefore says its policy in China is the correct way to handle the restrictive regime.
Google has been trying to win over the Chinese search market for yonks, but still trails behind home grown search engine Baidu.
