Trump can’t touch Google – experts

Trying to regulate ‘protected’ search engine ‘impossible’.

Washington

His attacks on Google drew headlines, but President Donald Trump would face an impossible task if his administration tried to regulate the leading internet search engine and its news results.

Legal and media experts say Google and other internet firms enjoy the same constitutional protections on free speech as news outlets, precluding any government interference with the search results that displease the president.

“Each search engine’s editorial judgment is much like many other familiar editorial judgments,” said Eugene Volokh, a University of California-Los Angeles law professor and author of a 2012 white paper on the constitutional First Amendment protection of search engines.

Volokh said in a blog post on Reason.com algorithms developed by Google and others are “editorial judgments about what users are likely to find interesting and valuable. And all these exercises of editorial judgment are fully protected by the First Amendment”.

Eric Goldman, co-director of the High-Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, said there is ample legal precedent for Google’s free-speech rights.

“Search engines fully qualify for First Amendment protections for their search results. Numerous cases going back over 15 years have confirmed this,” Goldman said.

“Any effort by Trump to ‘fix’ search engine results will violate the First Amendment. It’s not even a close question.”

Trump’s comments, however, stoked debate on the question when he assailed Google for what he termed “rigged” results that hide news from conservative outlets and promote content from what he called “left-wing” media.

Google countered the remarks by saying that “search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology”.

Trump on Tuesday issued an unspecified warning to tech firms, presumably related to his claims that they suppress conservative views. He repeated his claim on Wednesday, saying big tech firms “treat conservatives and Republicans very unfairly,” but stopped short of calling for regulation.

“You know what we want? Not regulation, we want fairness,” he told reporters. –