The news that Jeffrey Toback, a representative in the Nassau County Legislature, has filed a 16 page complaint alleging Google profits from child pornography has ignited discussion of censorship, responsibility and technology. Yet I can’t help thinking that everyone is missing the real point: why are allegations covered by 10 year old legislation being made at all?

Is the Government using child porn allegations to punish Google for earlier non-compliance perhaps? You need to cast your minds back to January when Google didn’t play ball with the FBI. The Bush administration would like to revive the proposed Child Online Protection Act, a law that would require websites to do more in restricting access to minors where there are links to adult content. In itself, this is something that few would have any logical reason to complain about. However, in order to provide statistical data to add weight to the argument, the FBI asked various search engines to hand over the search logs and indexed URLs that would reveal the extent of online interest in pornography. Google, quite rightly in my opinion, refused to comply. Why so? Well, the request for a million random URLs and every Google search from a random 7 day period is just too broad. The civil liberties issue too hot to handle. The intentions of the Government with regard to that data, and importantly the precedent set by handing it over, just not clear enough.

Fast forward to now: Toback claims Google “promotes and profits� from child pornography and accuses Google of being “the largest and most efficient facilitator and distributor of child pornography in the world.� Nowhere in the entire 16 page complaint is there mention of any other search engine, which is odd in itself. Even odder, perhaps, that nobody in the Nassau County Legislature seems to have advised Toback that the Communications Decency Act has the whole thing covered anyway. In case you are reading this Jeff, here’s the most relevant bit: "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

Ask any informed and unbiased legal expert and they will tell you that Google has a pretty airtight defence because it specifically excludes child pornography from the AdSense scheme, uses SafeSearch to filter adult content from searches, and proactively both prohibits and removes links when found. Google will happily tell you it already fully cooperates with law enforcement agencies in reporting any instances of child porn. So surely nobody really believes Google is the bad guy here? Which leaves me thinking that maybe the Government is still smarting from Google ‘daring to deny’ earlier in the year.

Of course there might be an even more straightforward explanation. It’s an election year…