Greetings. Over the weekend, and spilling over into this morning, the blogosphere and a variety of mailing lists were abuzz with accusations and speculation that Google, a vocal supporter of network neutrality issues, was "censoring" -- by tagging as potential "malware" (virus, etc.) sources -- pages of an organization's Web site that tends to take the ISP-centric stance on these issues, often opposite from Google's positions.

This noise was amplified by a pair of vocal pro-ISP, anti-Google personalities, who jumped with both feet into the opportunity to promote a theory that's about as reasonable as network neutrality actually being a plot to take over the world's communications in preparation for a mass UFO invasion (oops, did I just spill the beans?)

To the credit of the Web site under discussion, they quickly moved this morning to announce that in fact they had indeed suffered a database injection attack, Google's malware warning characterizations regarding the pages were accurate, and Google was not censoring the organization's site.

Story retractions by bloggers followed almost immediately, with the general theme being "better check out these stories more effectively in the future."

But wait a second. How could anyone believe such a wacko scenario in the first place? Because it makes absolutely no sense from the word go, unless your head is stuck in some sort of warped bizarro universe unrelated to the real world.

Even entertaining for a moment the idea that Google would engage in such censorship of those who don't agree with their policy positions, entails a whole string of unreasonable assumptions.

To start with, you have to assume that Google's management is not only evil, but stupid as well. They're neither.

Even if a firm in Google's position wanted to censor its "adversaries" -- to my mind a ridiculous idea from the git-go -- the blowback when it was inevitably and quickly discovered would absolutely lead to crucifixion on the patibulum of public opinion.

And by the way, trying to censor a site by tagging pages as potential malware would make no sense under any circumstances -- it wouldn't be particularly effective at actually censoring anything and would just draw attention to what was going on.

What really bothers me about this entire event is that reasonably well-informed people allowed themselves to be caught up in what can only be categorized as paranoid anti-Google speculation, without first thinking through how seriously ridiculous and unreasonable the whole story really was.

When intelligent people start behaving that way -- in what amounts to a cyberspace version of a mob mentality -- I think it's a strong indicator that passion is getting the better of logic in policy disputes, and that's a red flag that we should all be concerned about.

--Lauren--