NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Billionaire claims Google censorship -- the facts say otherwise
Billionaire claims Google censorship -- the facts say otherwise http://j.mp/nlcCbf (This message on Google+) Scottish billionaire Brian Souter has been raising quite a stink in the news today, loudly claiming that Google has "blocked" his Web site from search listings, and now proclaiming that he's launching a "free speech campaign" in response: http://j.mp/q10qA7 (Scotsman). When I heard about this claim this morning, I spent some time digging through his site (even reading the page source code), and running some experiments. His site clearly was in the index, but there were some anomalies that suggested some sort of hosting-related problem. Google this afternoon confirmed to me that technical problems at his site were the cause of the issues, that Google had been communicating with his team concerning the changes that needed to be made at his site to fix the problems, and that his team had been informed how to resubmit the site for a fresh Google crawl (using the expedited process in Google Webmaster Tools). It appears that Mr. Souter may have been impatient following the same well-defined procedure as anyone else whose site has had a similar technical issue, and -- we can only speculate about this of course -- went public in the hope that this would yield him special treatment. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein