Maradona Becomes a Public Face for Google Censorship

November 17th, 2008 | by: Laurie | Comments(1)

If you’re in Argentina and looking for news on the internet about Diego Maradona, you may soon be out of luck. Due to lawsuits, the Argentinian google may be forced to block any links about Maradona (among 110 other people) that don’t go to major news sites.

From Time Magazine:

What worries the search engines is that the ruling’s legal principle effectively holds them responsible for the content of web sites turned up in their searches.

A spokesperson for Google Argentina labeled the lawsuit “completely illogical. It would be like suing the newsstand for what appears in the newspapers it sells. Or demanding the newsstand vendor to tear out offending pages from the newspapers. The lawsuits should be against the websites carrying the information, not us.” Google Argentina has appealed the court order, and says it will not filter any links until the appeal has been decided.

The folks suing Google are claiming that this is not about stifling the flow of legit information:

[Attorney] Leguizamon argues that the search engines do not discriminate between links to appropiate material and links to pornographic sites that use the images of some of the models he represents. Maradona claims to have seen images of himself on porn sites linked to by Google.

(Um…gosh. What kind of indecent, smutty sites would link to things like that?)

The problem for anybody who values the free flow of information, though, is that even though things like that represent a tiny fraction of the Maradona links on google, there is no way for search engines to differentiate between those kinds of sites and the legit sites. So everything would be blocked.

So much for the free flow of information.

Even worse for fans of free speech, the public figures joining the lawsuit aren’t just celebrities. Three are judges. So if this is allowed to go forward, any blog posts, for example, that were critical of their judicial rulings would be blocked from being shown on Google. And the attorney would also be seeking damages even for things like innocuous images (such as, perhaps, the one in this post) that turn up in Google Image Searches.

The funniest part about this is that is won’t even work. Even with the blocks in place, all anybody has to do is exit the Argentinian google and go to the main Google site to repeat the searches.

This kind of thing is something you’d expect from a communist country like China or Cuba. From a country that purports to be a democracy? Not so much. A huge thumbs down to Argentina if they allow this to go through.