Google’s Alan Davidson on Areas of Special Concern
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Alan Davidson, Washington Policy Counsel and head of Google’s new Washington DC government affairs office, made several interesting remarks in his panel statement. Among them: He identified the following two areas that are of special concern to search engine providers:
(1) Conceptual shift in speech regulation
- Old approach (offline media): focused on publishers, readers
- New & emerging generation of speech regulation: focus on deliverers – intermediaries are supposed to police the networks. Examples where this approach is currently up for discussion in D.C.: access to pharmaceutical products, blocking of gaming websites
- Assessment: It’s not a good idea to target intermediaries: Due process, procedural problem: intermediary, e.g., can’t tell whether or not a particular site featuring copyrighted content is a fair use or not; by going after the intermediary you take the publisher out of equation, can’t go to courts to argue the case
- Misguided, because search engines are only in the business of indexing existing content; they’re not editors (can’t be, given the scale.)
(2) Government access to information
- Increasing pressures to provide personalized information (search history, etc.) to third parties
- Best privacy policy doesn’t help if government wants information for national security reasons; standards really low; plus: search engines not allowed to inform users that info has been passed on to third parties.
