A recently enacted law seeks to remove all such content from the internet in India. Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were sued under the law and had been arguing in Indian court that it was all but impossible for them to comply as a practical matter. The law makes online publishers potentially liable for the acts of individual users and third parties (think “offensive” blog hosted on Blogger or “objectionable” video uploaded to YouTube).

According to a BBC report Indian Communications Minister Kapil Sibal said the following in December about the desired impact of the new law:

My aim is that insulting material never gets uploaded. We will evolve guidelines and mechanisms to deal with the issue. [The companies] will have to give us the data, where these images are being uploaded and who is doing it.

Google, Facebook and others had argued that they had no control over individuals and should not be held liable for their conduct accordingly. They said they cannot “pre-filter” material generated by millions of users. This is what would be called a “prior restraint” against free speech in the US.

Indian courts have been unsympathetic and demanded that the companies comply or be blocked entirely “like in China.” The BBC says that the companies have now complied and removed offending material at issue in a particular civil lawsuit.

However the overly vague nature of the statute on which these claims are based almost guarantees that Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and other online publishers in India will face a steady stream of litigation from individuals or groups “offended” by this or that image, article or video.

Stock image used under license from Shutterstock

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As Czech Position reports, Google has agreed to several conditions put forth by the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection:

• Google will take photos closer to ground level to avoid photographing personal property over fences/walls.
• Google will give Czech citizens a method to demand that their property be removed from Street View.
• Google will blur license plates/registration information on vehicles.
• Google will pre-announce when it’s planning to photograph in Czech towns and cities.

The concessions are similar to ones that Google has made in other countries.

Google began Street View operations in the Czech Republic back in the spring of 2009, and put images online in the fall. But by December of that year, government officials shut down the service over privacy concerns.

According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.”

Bottin Cartographes provides mapping services for a cost, and its website boasts several business clients such as Louis Vuitton, Airbus and several automobile manufacturers.

The French court ruling requires Google to pay $660,000 (500,000 Euros) in damages and interest to Bottin Cartographes, along with a 15,000 Euro fine. That means Google’s total cost from the ruling is about $680,000.

A Google France spokesperson says the company is still studying the court’s decision and reviewing its options, adding that Google is “convinced that a free high-quality mapping tool is beneficial for both Internet users and websites.”

As you can see from the related stories listed below, this is far from the first time that the French have raised legal issues with Google.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed to singlehandedly convince some government reps to let Googlebot crawl and index their websites.

One of those in the audience was Kang Min-koo, a senior judge in the Seoul High Court. When he saw the court’s Web site was on Mr. Cutts’ list of government sites that couldn’t be indexed by Google – and thus couldn’t be found on a Google search – he sent a text message by phone to the court’s webmaster ordering it to be changed.

Since the change can be made by altering just a few lines of software code, the webmaster had it done in no time. When it came time for questions, Mr. Kang asked Mr. Cutts to check if the High Court’s site showed up on Google – and it did.

Cutts’ visit to South Korea comes on the heels of tension between the government and Google. Earlier this month, the Korean Fair Trade Commission accused Google of interfering with its Android antitrust investigation. The commission alleges that Google deleted documents pertinent to its investigation into whether Google is limiting access to local search engines on Android smartphones.

There’s also the matter that South Korea is one of only a handful of countries where Google isn’t the dominant search engine. And, as the WSJ points out, Google isn’t likely to gain market share in Korea if prominent websites aren’t in its index.

While Cutts may have the title of being Google’s chief spam cop, he’s long been one of the companies go-to public faces. A little more than a year ago, Google sent him to Washington, DC on an “educational tour” aimed at telling government officials that Google’s search results don’t need to be regulated.

Mittlerweile benutzen fast 10 Millionen Nutzer in Deutschland regelmäßig Bing, das sind 20 Prozent der aktiven Internetnutzer hierzulande.

According to several third-party sources, Bing’s market share is smaller than the 20 percent figure cited above. For example, the following is StatCounter’s search engine data for Germany:

Source: StatCounter

NetMarketshare generally agrees, showing Bing’s PC search share at just over 2 percent.

The combined Bing-Yahoo “search alliance” share in the US is about 30 percent. However the search alliance has considerably less reach in Europe. While the organic-results merger was completed last year, Microsoft adCenter is just now rolling out in Europe.

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Beyond unethical there’s a question about the legality of the behavior if proven to be true. Google says it’s investigating and sent us this statement:

These are clearly very serious allegations, and we are doing everything possible to investigate them.

(See updated statement from Google below.)

While the evidence presented by Magdalinski is very detailed and seems credible, I still have some trouble believing that Google would officially authorize a systematic campaign of fraud like this. Others have no trouble believing it and accept the allegations as true –  because many of those people believe Google has crossed over to the dark side.

One executive I spoke with the other day about something largely unrelated to Google told me he thought that Google would emerge as, “The most evil company the world has ever known.” That’s a verbatim statement. It’s pretty amazing and extreme but one hears these sorts of things now. This kind of venom used to be reserved almost exclusively for Microsoft in its antitrust heyday (e.g., “the evil empire”).

Google has in the past couple of years (and especially very recently) become a polarizing company. Among tech insiders, increasingly it seems you’re either a critic or a fan. I try to be objective in my view of Google (although I’ve been accused of being a “fanboy”). But I do tend to give the company the benefit of the doubt, unless the evidence suggests otherwise.

The Kenya controversy and the Search Plus Your World (SPYW) uproar have emerged as a sort of Rorschach test.

Google says that it intends to include much more social content into SPYW over time, including Twitter and Facebook, if those services will allow. But many people see Google simply promoting Google+ at the expense of others and tend to be extremely cynical about Google’s motives and behavior. (I find it strange that Google would so nakedly attempt to push Google+ given how directly that plays into its critics’ hands.)

The same is true this morning with the Kenya controversy. Some people simply accept that Google is guilty because they now view Google as the type of company willing to do the kinds of things claimed by Mocality. However I think there needs to be more information before anyone can reasonably conclude what happened.

The larger point here, however, is that people are increasingly inclined to leap to conclusions about Google based on their fundamental belief that the company is good or “evil.” More and more they project on to the Google ink blot whatever they want to see.

Postscript: Google apparently discovered the Mocality allegations to be accurate and issued the following statement, by Nelson Mattos, Vice-President for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging Markets:

“We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologized to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.”

Also see our A “Mortified” Google Apologizes To Mocality For Poaching Customers, Lying About Relationship story.

Ink blot image via Shutterstock

For some context and comparison, Apple’s China revenues were roughly $13 billion in fiscal 2011. That’s about 12 percent of the company’s overall revenue.

While Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt would probably say there’s been no “reversal” or change of policy, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google is now “softening its tone” and “renewing its push” into China. According to the paper:

The search giant is hiring more engineers, salespeople and product managers in China and working to introduce new services for Chinese consumers, according to Daniel Alegre, Google’s top executive in Asia. In particular, Google is aiming to capitalize on its fast-growing Android operating system for mobile devices, online-advertising and product-search services to grow in China, Mr. Alegre said in an interview.

One goal, he said, is to introduce its Android Market, which offers thousands of mobile applications to users of Android-powered smartphones and tablets but isn’t available in China . . . The company also is trying to win over Chinese consumers with services that don’t require official censorship, such as Shihui, which launched in September to help people search among Chinese sites offering discounts at local stores. Google is also working to beef up its product-search service to help consumers find goods from online retailers.

According to various sources, China’s internet audience is close to 400 million people and its mobile subscriber population is roughly double that, or 800 million. According to China-focused iResearch the Chinese internet market looks like the following:

Below is iResearch’s ranking of the top 20 Chinese websites. Google is number 13 on the list.

Roughly two years ago, Google said it would no longer censor search results in China after a coordinated effort to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The weight of evidence unearthed thereafter argued that the Chinese government or its surrogates were behind that attack, as well as subsequent hacking efforts directed at Google and other non-Chinese corporations.

Postscript: A Google spokesperson offered the following comment to us in response to this story: “Our position in China remains unchanged.”

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Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam made his comments this week to the Iranian Labour News Agency (original article), and the story — as you can imagine — has been picked up by a number of other media outlets. As Israel’s Arutz Sheva reports, Moghaddam says a state-controlled internet will help protect Iran from its enemies:

Establishing a ‘halal’ Internet based on Islamic law will allow the Ahmadinejad regime to make sure unwanted material does not appear on social network services, which were instrumental in the protests against the allegedly rigged reelection of Ahmadinejad more than two years ago.

The official Iranian news agency IRNA announced on Sunday that the country’s own Internet network will solve problems with costs, security and bandwidth. The new network is to become operational in a few weeks and will not need international bandwidth for domestic connection.

There’s a little bit of history here beyond the use of the internet and social networks as a protest tool in Iran (and elsewhere). Earlier this year, Google finally began allowing web users in Iran to download apps such as Google Earth, Picasa and Chrome. Last year, some in Iran were angered when they discovered a Star of David atop the Iran Air headquarters on Google Maps and Google Earth.

* Don’t remember Baghdad Bob? See WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com for a reminder.

(Stock image via Shutterstock. Used under license.)

According to the CNET article Korean official Kim Dong-soo asserted that Google has obstructed his agency’s investigation “by deleting key files from PCs and asking its employees to telecommute from home.” Google has denied obstructing the inquiry and pledged cooperation with Korean government officials.

In April of last year, NHN Corp. (Naver) and Daum Communications filed antitrust complaints with the South Korean equivalent of the US Fair Trade Commission. The complaints claim that Google is blocking them from putting their search applications on Android phones in South Korea.

NHN/Naver and Daum control roughly 90 percent of the South Korean PC search market between the two companies. Google has less than 5 percent and is using Android as part of a strategy to grow market share. Reportedly about 70 percent of the smartphones sold in South Korea are Android handsets. And South Korea’s Samsung has emerged as Google’s premier Android partner, dominating global sales of Android devices.

South Korea has historically been very aggressive in various legal actions against Google. During the Google WiFi-personal data collection scandal South Korean police sought to file criminal charges against Google executives.

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In the case of this French company, when you typed in their company name, Lyonnaise de Garantie it suggested at the end of the name escroc, which means crook or swindler. Google lost the case and was ordered to pay €50,000 ($64,670).

As you know, Google’s Search Suggestions, part of Google Instant, shows search result completions as you type. The suggestions are based off of search query volume. So if many people are searching for your name with an offensive term at the end, Google will use that data to searchers as a possible likely query match.

Every now and then, those suggestions can be hurtful to the reputation of a company or individual. That is why there is a whole new industry around online reputation management for search results and even search suggestions.

In France, Google has been sued and convicted numerous times over those search suggestions.

The Paris court held that in this case the suggestion “was offensive towards the company” and Google should be able to have “human control” over these suggestions. As you know, Google does not like human intervention in the search results and thus went to court to protect their ideology. They did so even after losing similar cases in the past in this and some other countries. I do not think Google would lose a case like this in the U.S.

As you can see, the search result doesn’t seem to show up anymore. I assume the court also forced Google to remove it.

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