The same rule applies to beer manufacturers, soft drink bottlers or anyone else, they can sell ads if they choose, and absent illegal discrimination they can arbitrarily refuse to carry some content. A telephone company (the incumbent, anyway) is required to provide service to everyone who can pay, but they have the right to refuse certain ads in the yellow pages.

Now, it is conceivably possible that a privilege can be granted in exchange for being required to accept certain types of ads or content, such as if ISP immunity were conditioned on net neutrality, or some other reason, then it’s a different matter.

For example, broadcast stations do not have to run commercials for political candidates for federal office. But once they do, by law they are required to accept all ads from any legitimate candidate and cannot refuse to run the ad. As a corollary, the station is treated as a common carrier when it runs the ad, it has complete immunity for the content. Now, this requirement can be justified because broadcast stations have to be licensed. An equivalent requirement placed on newspapers has been struck down as unconstitutional.

Stop crying. Google doesn’t owe you anything. They are not blocking you. I just searched Google for “Roy Cooper fraud,” and your site was the second in the results list.

There’s more than one Roy Cooper, and there’s more than one site discussing your Roy Cooper. There’s no reason to expect a search engine to list your site every time someone searches for “Roy Cooper.” Indeed, that’s the opposite of what we should expect from a quality search engine.

As anyone can tell you, the search terms have to be just right for Google to point you where you want to go. Go ahead: click my name and see for yourself. You’re not being censored.

Roy Cooper is too powerful and the papers are too supportive of the Democratic Party. Nifong;s corruption is commonplace in N.C., that’s why he thought he could get away with it.

Chris Langdon, qiology@aol.com

The court did allow my claims against Google, for breach of contract, to continue.

My website, http://www.ncjusticefraud.com, exposes fraud on the US Supreme Court by N.C. Att. Gen. Roy Cooper. Google removed that site from its search results for “Roy Cooper,” and “Attorney Genral Roy Cooper,” after I attempted to advertise it, while Microsoft ranked it highly in its search results. After I filed suit, Google re-instated my website. However, it has recently deleted it from its 638 search results for “Roy Cooper,” while Yahoo and Microsoft rank it in the top 20. You can get a free copy of “Mein Kampf” in Google’s search results. My site does not support mass murder, as Mao and Hitler did. My site has been in existence for 16 months, without any objection from Roy Cooper, who has not asked for a retraction, nor has he he sued me for libel. Google censored my site becuase Google recently negotiated $260 million in economic incentives to locate a new facility in N.C.

Google lies when it says that its search results are “objective” and the result of a computer algorithm, without human intervention.

The manipulation of my NC site in Google’s search results proves that. I thought lying was evil, right Brin and Page?

Chris Langdon, qiology@aol.com

I think the key point for me is only that the First Amendment should not be allowed to short circuit debate on the points they (and I) raise. One can easily imagine courts using Tornillo to strike down a statute that, say, makes newspapers reveal to some government body (even a private one) information about how they decide what is news. But it would be very troubling if that sort of immunity precluded any efforts to go “behind the curtain” at the search engine to determine if, say, manipulation of results or other untoward behavior occurred. The newspaper and the search engine serve very different functions.

In fact, in this case I think the phone directory analogy is apt: with regard to the utility-like listing of all public phone numbers in a certain geographic area, a phone directory can be made subject to those regulations relevant to a public utility (or, conversely, can claim the same lack of responsibility for content as a utility); with regard to the advertising space it sells on its pages, however, the phone directory both enjoys the First Amendment protections and carries the social responsibilities of any private advetiser.

For purposes of advertising, Google is one of any number of web outlets. If Google refuses his ad, he has many, many other places to advertise. So, absent some other concern (perhaps Google allows him to target a particular market much more effectively than any other site?), the analogy to newspapers for the purposes of adverstising doesn’t seem so far off.

No one would argue that Google is the dominant search engine. So, when Google is viewed qua search engine, rather than advertisment outlet, it should be subject to greater scrutiny.

Along those lines, the conduit argument starts to break down when Google tweaks the search alogithm to specificially eliminate certain search results, such as the George Bush result for “miserable failure” search terms. Is Google permitted to make editorial decisions of that sort and still maintain that it’s just a passive conduit? I’m not so sure.

But on the other hand, can the law really step in and make editorial decisions about what sort of code is acceptible? I don’t think there’s an easy answer.

yeah – limiting such frivolous claims AND limiting more regulation keeps me up at night too. How else to keep law as a growth industry.