Greetings. In Wikileaks Saga Reveals Governments' Hypocrisy, Deep Fear of Internet and Internet Realities: Why There May Be Many More Wikileaks , I've discussed some of the reactions to the recent Wikileaks disclosures, and how the structure of the Internet makes it virtually impossible to "stamp out" all copies of any material after they've been publicly posted.

But that's not to say that some major network entities aren't at risk from new calls to limit free speech based on claimed (even if not demonstrated) "national security" and other grounds.

Thought experiment:

You're a national government. You're royally upset about the presence of some information on the Internet that you'd prefer not be publicly available. Perhaps it's politically inconvenient data, or simply embarrassing. Whatever. You realize that you can't stamp it out at the source -- it's already been widely mirrored, and anyone can find copies with a simple search.

What do you do?

One potential answer may be painfully obvious. You try to find some way to "control" Google -- and Bing, and any other search engines of note.

The goal is clear enough. Like a book that has been incorrectly shelved in a gigantic library, the fact that "unwanted" information exists is far less troublesome if ordinary people can't easily find it. And for many people, if they can't find something on Google, it might as well not exist.

One of Google's "crown jewels" is the reverence with which they treat the "indexing rules" that provide organic (natural, non-paid) search results, even as their search quality engineers are continually and carefully tweaking the algorithms' details.

Google (quite reasonably) doesn't like to "special case" searches -- they'd much rather find algorithmic solutions with more general applicability to deal with a range of search situations.

And when Google is pushed from the outside to reveal internal information or remove specific search results (by law enforcement or whomever), Google laudably is known to be quite demanding of valid court orders or other proper legal actions -- and even then the internal debates over the appropriate response in any given case can reportedly often be quite vigorous -- a very encouraging aspect indeed.

Google correctly asserts that their search results are their opinions, and that these results are subject to full First Amendment protections.

But the rhetoric surrounding Wikileaks is spinning ever farther out of control, with demands for investigations of the New York Times and other mainstream media, proposed new laws to prohibit particular forms of speech, and calls for "cyber-counterattacks" -- not to mention utterly outrageous appeals for the illegal assassination of Wikileaks' founder.

It doesn't take a giant leap of the imagination to see how Google, Bing, and other search engines could become attractive targets -- legislatively or through more secretive demands -- for those officials and other persons in various countries who are probably already brainstorming about ways to restrict effective access to Internet information, by limiting and controlling those firms that organize and index the Web in the first place.

I hope this remains merely a theoretical, a thought experiment, a figment of concern that never materializes into hard reality.

But I believe that the associated risks in this supercharged, highly-emotional and often irrational political environment -- to Google and others -- are very real. They'd fight back of course, to the extent that it was legally possible to do so. But would they prevail? I don't think it's safe to bet the farm on that assumption these days.

It would behoove us all to start thinking right now about what we can do -- particularly as individuals dedicated to freedom of speech and civil rights, and especially for those of us that are technologically inclined -- to help Google, Bing, and other search engines avoid and if necessary mitigate the possibilities of future government attempts to mutate them from honest indexers of Internet data into government information control puppets.

This is a nightmare that we need to try prevent -- starting right now -- before it even has a chance to be more than a glimmer in the eyes of those who so desperately wish to remake the Internet in their own fundamentally repressive image.

--Lauren--