Over at Battellemedia, John Battelle highlights a disturbing intervention by the U.S. Government. He quotes the following from SiliconValley.com:

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google Inc. to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.

The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content inaccessible to minors.

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for one million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.

The Mountain View-based search engine opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.

Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, said the company will fight the government’s effort “vigorously.”

Battelle thinks this is about more than porn and has sinister implications for the Internet. We agree. When a small group of people claims the right to own the minds and thoughts of everyone else without either asking or paying for the content, something rather psychotic is going on.

At least Google offers a 78.5 percent cut of the revenues from contextual advertising draped around the content. What will President Bush offer?

President Chirac of France is at it again, railing against the Anglo-Saxons, this time their dominance of the Internet. Now he wants to challenge Google and Yahoo’s pre-eminence in search.

Project Quaero, Latin for “I seek”, is his answer. It is a joint Franco-German initiative aimed at creating a Euro search engine. It will be funded by government and businesses in France and Germany. Thomson is expected to lead the French side, while Bertelsmann is reported to be Germany’s main player.

PC Pro comments: “The project’s aim is to provide search and indexing technologies that enable multimedia files to be searched ‘natively’. Rather than rely on text, such as the key word meta data added to videos for example, the Quaero would be able to index a video file by analysing the content itself.”

Judging by the ineptitude of most EU projects, the Googlers don’t have too much to fear from Quaero, except perhaps in trying to pronounce its name.

SearchEngineWatch points us to a new site that tracks the “evilness” or otherwise of Google. The website, evilornot.info, tracks stories as they appear on the Internet, typically on sites like tech.memeorandum, and collates them into an Evil index for the company.

No doubt a complex algorithm is used in the process, prompting the question: Are algorithms evil? After all, how can we tell what sort of approximation to the truth we’re being given?

Anyway, vistors to the site can vote if they wish. There are five options running from 0 percent evil to 100 percent evil.

For how long will we find this amusing?

There’s an interesting article about Google in The Economist, which is getting some play in tech.memeorandum. Here’s a taster:

One visitor to the company’s “Googleplex” in Silicon Valley “felt as if I were in the company of missionaries”. A consequence of the theory that Google is aiming to run the world could be that “Google may be less liked in the industry than Microsoft inside 12 months,” says Pip Coburn, a technology analyst. Bloggers have started accusing Google of hubris and arrogance. Paul Saffo at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future says that “Google is a religion posing as a company.”

Or try this: “… ‘they’re trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test’ ~ in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.”

Read more …