Prior censorship is never a good model
January 8th, 2009 | Published in Google Public Policy
The Internet in Argentina is going through some hard times. Despite the fact that search engines have no control over third party content, Argentinean courts have issued preliminary injunctions seeking to place liability on search engines for content found on third party websites. Public officials have requested that search engines remove all search results that may be associated with their names, thereby eliminating any links to news media, opinion pages, online publications, government websites containing information about the officials, and even the court websites where the officials work.
These proceedings threaten both freedom of expression and access to information, and pose a grave threat to the future development of the Internet in Argentina. In the interest of preserving the Internet as a free and open platform and guaranteeing freedom of expression, Google will fight this decision.
For more background and to learn more, check out my post on the Official Google Blog for Latin America (in Spanish).