Search engines have same speech rights as New York Times says Google report

Just as the New York Times can decide All the News Thats Fit to Print, search engines have a free speech right to choose who or what to put in their search rankings.

Thats the conclusion of a prominent First Amendment scholar commissioned by Google to make the case that the government cant tell search engines how to design their results.

A Free Speech Right?

According to the report authored by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh: Google, Microsofts Bing, Yahoo! Search and other search engine companies are rightly seen as media enterprises, much as the New York Times Company or CNN are media enterprises and deserve the same protections. It adds that search engines have the same freedom to choose a set of links as do news aggregators like the Drudge Report or the Huffington Post.

Search engine results are a form of opinion, says the report, in which companies offer information they think is most relevant to users.

In practice, this would mean Google has the right to punt sites like Yelp, which has complained that Google is a monopolist, to the search equivalent of Siberia if it decided that was best for users (Yelp now comes up second in a search for restaurant review).

The US has a long history of companies claiming First Amendment protections. One example is a newspaper that was allowed to exclude certain advertisers even though it had a substantial monopoly.

The courts have also made a few exceptions to the free speech rule. One case involved a publisher that was sued for providing inaccurate flight maps. Another involved cable providers which, a court said, did not have a free speech right to exclude certain channels.

Volokhs report says those free speech exceptions dont apply to search engines because, unlike cable providers, its not just a pipe for information. It also echoes Google position that consumers can easily use a competing search engine.

In an interview, Volokh said Googles situation is also similar to a 1980s case in which an author launched a failed suit against the New York Times over the accuracy of the newspapers weekly best-seller list.

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Search engines have same speech rights as New York Times says Google report