I have an idea. Ignore them. Let them enforce their own edicts, rulings, and laws. If enough people disobey, it becomes impossible to enforce. That's why civil disobedience works. Now, if Google grew a pair and told the judge to get lost ... well ... I'll be mighty impressed and they would earn my respect.
> I don't think it is cowardly for Google to obey the law and court orders.
I do. I would never comply with any government request unless it was preceded by a court order. And if a court order had been obtained, I would use common sense to determine if the request should be granted. Anything less IS cowardly.
If you don't stand up to abuse, the abuse will simply continue.
While I realize that there are defensible reasons to actively reject some government directives the benefits of a lawful society should not be underestimated. Bad laws should be fixed via legislative action. Sometimes this means complying with the bad law in the interim.
Selective enforcement and/or selective non-compliance may be justifiable as a tactical response but if taken too far then we no longer have the rule of law.
The other clear distinction to make here is that it isn't exactly Google's fight since the content that is being targeted is merely being indexed by Google not created by Google. So logically it is the content owners/creator (website owners) who should be standing up to this kind of action. Unfortunately such fights are often extremely lopsided (small publisher vs. huge corporation), so people expect Google to step in to help because it is tangentially involved, but most of the time it is simply not practical.
Its absolutely Google's fight. Google does nothing but publish links. Linking is absolutely protected speech. Google's entire business is being threatened by a judge ignorant of the law.
The larger you are, the harder it gets to disobey their rulings. Google can fight if the ruling is illegal or obviously unfair, but they can't hide and pretend it's not with them after being mentioned.
> The larger you are, the harder it gets to disobey their rulings.
Imagine Google replacing google.com with a clear statement denouncing a particular government action and naming names? Imagine Google de-indexing the government instead? They have so many more options available quite simply because they have such massive exposure.
Imagine the U.S. government taking google.com from the DNS list and making it a felony to link to not only the domain but the IP addresses that belong to Google as well.
I don't think they can do that just for putting up a message yet. At least I hope to God they can't. For de-listing government sites, they would probably suffer consequences.
Voluntarily delisting something is unthinkable. It would violate the most basic principle for a search engine - to present the information without distortion.
