Google vs governments – let the new battle for free speech begin

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[/audioplayer]Imagine there was one newspaper that landed all the scoops. Literally all of them. Big news, silly news, the lot. When those girlfriendless, finger-wagging freaks in Syria and Iraq opted to behead another aid worker, it would be reported here first. Likewise when nude photographs of a Hollywood actress were stolen by a different bunch of girlfriendless freaks. Hell of a newspaper, this one. Imagine it.

After a while, imagine that western governments began to realise that this newspaper had sources that their own security services just couldn’t rival. So imagine that the editors of this mighty, astonishing newspaper were summoned to Downing Street and told to hand it all over. Names, contact details, locations, known associates — the works. It wouldn’t be temperate, this meeting. In the aftermath, various sources would describe it as ‘a bollocking’. And they might protest, these various editors, that their job was only to report on the world, not to police it, and that if they began to hand over sources then their sources would merely go elsewhere, to rivals who would not. But the government wouldn’t care about that. ‘Do as we say,’ the politicians, mandarins and security chiefs would say. ‘Do as we say, or we’ll make your lives a bloody misery.’ And imagine how you’d feel about that.

Now call this newspaper ‘Google’, and watch your conceptual world swivel slightly. Of course, Google isn’t really a newspaper. In fact, it may be the greatest enemy that newspapers have; bastardising copy, mocking copy-right and gradually forcing a whole industry to swap editorial judgment for search engine optimisation. Yet in terms of pure news, Ofcom reports that Google’s news arm is read by more people than the Sky News website. Google also owns YouTube, which hosts so much online video that it virtually is online video.