Google's Censorship of Search Results

Google’s corporate motto suggests an almost altruistic mission. However, the reality is much different from the brand’s manicured image.

Recently here at RedState, ericathunderpaws wrote an open letter to Google outlining its censorship of search results critical of Islam, statist politics and the Chinese government. But this week, the New York Times brought to light the fact that Google doesn’t only use it’s overwhelming power to censor speech–apparently Google has now deemed itself worthy of deciding which small businesses thrive or fail.

After a 30-year career in the law, Dominique Barella left his job as president of the main union for French judges in 2006 and started a Web site, Ejustice.fr, that lets users search for legal resources in France.
…
[W]ithin a few months, it was attracting up to 20,000 visitors a day and selling a modest amount of advertising.

That, Mr. Barella says, is when the trouble with Google began.
 
Overnight, traffic plunged — because, Mr. Barella says, the company stopped indexing pages from Ejustice.fr for inclusion in Google’s search engine.

If Google can effectively shut down a small business, which, arguably, isn’t even in competition with Google, what restraint DOES the company have?

In the late ’90s, the Department of Justice took Microsoft to court over the bundling of their Internet Explorer browser with the Windows OS. At the time, the company had about 85% of the OS market share and, Justice charged, it used that power to shut out competitors. Today, Google’s market share of search engine queries hovers around 80%.

Surely Google’s programming of their search algorithm to censor political speech and strong-arm small businesses throughout the world deserves a government inquiry. And if it is found that the world’s most-used search provider is employing a command-and-control strategy for the Internet, it must answer for its actions.