Google turned on censorship and started filtering BitTorrent, RapidShare and other sites.
It took a while, but Google finally sagged under the pressure of the entertainment industry, under pressure from organizations like MPAA and RIAA. The search engine now actively censors its search, excluding phrases such as BitTorrent, torrent, utorrent, RapidShare and Megaupload in the course of providing instant search and autocompletion services. The reactions of the affected companies are not at all benign - BitTorrent Inc., RapidShare and Vodo oppose this act of commercial censorship.
The task of the entertainment industry to eradicate piracy on the Internet has again resulted in commercial censorship. A few weeks ago, Google announced that it would start filtering “piracy-related” requests for the AutoFill and Instant Search services, and yesterday they silently launched this dubious feature.
Without a public announcement, Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of words for which the “auto-complete” service is no longer valid. Although the implications of this decision now do not affect the search results, Google made it clear that they want to censor their services prudently, and even more so than many expected.
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The list of banned keywords includes uTorrent, a very popular and absolutely legal software, as well as BitTorrent, a protocol and file transfer program between computers on the Internet, and the name of the company BitTorrent Inc., located in San Francisco. Today, these words will no longer be offered to you by Google when you enter their first letter, or appear in the Instant-search.
All combinations with the word "torrent" are also completely prohibited. This means that the site will not offer you the “Ubuntu torrent” option, if you type Ubuntu in the search bar, and the same thing happens with any combination ending in the word torrent. This feature, of course, applies to the names of popular movies and music albums, which are the ultimate goal of the list of banned words of Google.
TorrentFreak contacted BitTorrent Inc. to learn about their reactions to what was happening, and Simon Morris responded to TorrentFreak that the scope of influence of this filter is extremely wide.
“We respect Google’s right to implement algorithms aimed at providing users with search results of proper quality. As it was said, the registered name of our company is absolutely unique, and we are sure that any person entering the first six or seven letters of her name deserves the same easy access to the search results as the user searching for information about any other company. ” said morris.
“In a quick search with the input word“ BitTorrent ”, a large number of legitimate and useful links are displayed, such as company information, our software, our open source protocol and others. Google may not understand that our technology is used for many purposes that are relevant to the technology industry, companies, artists and users in general, ”he added.
The most surprising thing about the new filter is that the words seem to be arbitrarily chosen. The list includes BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent and Xunlei, but does not include BitComet and Vuze. While RapidShare and MegaUpload file storages are in the ban list, and the famous 4shared, HotFile and MediaFire sites are not in the list.
In addition, all the names of popular torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay, are also not included in the list of banned Google words. Simon Morris of BitTorrent agrees that this is strange, to say the least.
“There’s no reason for Google to omit search results for our brands, including BitTorrent, µTorrent, and torrent. In fact, they still provide an autocomplete service for many third-party torrent clients that use the BitTorrent protocol — for example, BitComet and BitLord, and even for The Pirate Bay and Isohunt sites. ”
Morris also points out that the inclusion of Xunlei smacks of hypocrisy, because Google is one of the investors of the Chinese BitTorrent client.
“We also would like to emphasize that even though Google turned off autocompletion for Xunlei (the largest Chinese client using the BitTorrent protocol), they invested $ 5 million in this company in 2006,” says Morris, adding that “We really hope that Google will understand the value of BitTorrent and quickly reconsider this decision. ”
RapidShare also complains about the new filter, especially its scale at today's launch.
“We have been aware of Google’s plans for several weeks. We recognize that closing certain instant search results is natural for Rapidshare, but we believe that this will also affect the legitimate interests of our users. We believe that the decision to remove RapidShare from the live search is wrong, ”commented on the situation in Rapidshare.
“RapidShare is one of the most popular sites in the world. Every day, hundreds of thousands of users rely on our services to pursue their very legitimate goals and interests. Therefore, it is obvious that Google has gone too far with censoring results and an additional algorithm. The results of the search engine should take into account the interests of users, not the interests of Google or someone else, ”the company added.
RapidShare really buzzed Google. It is clear that this filter is the result of coercion by the entertainment industry, whose interests do not coincide with the interests of users. Now that Google has begun to censor services for commercial reasons, more companies will demand the same. At the same time, the entertainment industry will continue to force Google to go even further and censor the search results themselves.
Obviously, Google decided that their users should not search for anything using the BitTorrent keyword, so why then display any results for this search? This is the beginning of the end.
Jamie King, founder of Vodo - a platform on which artists can post their work and show them to millions of people for free - agrees with this assessment. During a Google search for one of their completely legal releases, the site suggested the word "torrent" with a link to the page to download, but this is no longer there.
“Google has already demonstrated that it is ready to be censored for a good price - China immediately appears in the mind. Now they do it for MPAA & Co., ”said King.
“It's simple: our favorite search company doesn't care much about helping the thousands of independent creators who use BitTorrent to distribute legal, freely available files, but they care about protecting the interests of Big Media in their death agony” .
Indeed, Google went the wrong way, censoring services willingly and extensively to appease a few large companies. This is not a way to get rid of piracy, it is a way to create a controlled Internet. Google might be proud to have left China because of its political censorship, but they should be ashamed of advertising commercial censorship all over the world.
The task of the entertainment industry to eradicate piracy on the Internet has again resulted in commercial censorship. A few weeks ago, Google announced that it would start filtering “piracy-related” requests for the AutoFill and Instant Search services, and yesterday they silently launched this dubious feature.
Without a public announcement, Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of words for which the “auto-complete” service is no longer valid. Although the implications of this decision now do not affect the search results, Google made it clear that they want to censor their services prudently, and even more so than many expected.
')
The list of banned keywords includes uTorrent, a very popular and absolutely legal software, as well as BitTorrent, a protocol and file transfer program between computers on the Internet, and the name of the company BitTorrent Inc., located in San Francisco. Today, these words will no longer be offered to you by Google when you enter their first letter, or appear in the Instant-search.
All combinations with the word "torrent" are also completely prohibited. This means that the site will not offer you the “Ubuntu torrent” option, if you type Ubuntu in the search bar, and the same thing happens with any combination ending in the word torrent. This feature, of course, applies to the names of popular movies and music albums, which are the ultimate goal of the list of banned words of Google.
TorrentFreak contacted BitTorrent Inc. to learn about their reactions to what was happening, and Simon Morris responded to TorrentFreak that the scope of influence of this filter is extremely wide.
“We respect Google’s right to implement algorithms aimed at providing users with search results of proper quality. As it was said, the registered name of our company is absolutely unique, and we are sure that any person entering the first six or seven letters of her name deserves the same easy access to the search results as the user searching for information about any other company. ” said morris.
“In a quick search with the input word“ BitTorrent ”, a large number of legitimate and useful links are displayed, such as company information, our software, our open source protocol and others. Google may not understand that our technology is used for many purposes that are relevant to the technology industry, companies, artists and users in general, ”he added.
The most surprising thing about the new filter is that the words seem to be arbitrarily chosen. The list includes BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent and Xunlei, but does not include BitComet and Vuze. While RapidShare and MegaUpload file storages are in the ban list, and the famous 4shared, HotFile and MediaFire sites are not in the list.
In addition, all the names of popular torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay, are also not included in the list of banned Google words. Simon Morris of BitTorrent agrees that this is strange, to say the least.
“There’s no reason for Google to omit search results for our brands, including BitTorrent, µTorrent, and torrent. In fact, they still provide an autocomplete service for many third-party torrent clients that use the BitTorrent protocol — for example, BitComet and BitLord, and even for The Pirate Bay and Isohunt sites. ”
Morris also points out that the inclusion of Xunlei smacks of hypocrisy, because Google is one of the investors of the Chinese BitTorrent client.
“We also would like to emphasize that even though Google turned off autocompletion for Xunlei (the largest Chinese client using the BitTorrent protocol), they invested $ 5 million in this company in 2006,” says Morris, adding that “We really hope that Google will understand the value of BitTorrent and quickly reconsider this decision. ”
RapidShare also complains about the new filter, especially its scale at today's launch.
“We have been aware of Google’s plans for several weeks. We recognize that closing certain instant search results is natural for Rapidshare, but we believe that this will also affect the legitimate interests of our users. We believe that the decision to remove RapidShare from the live search is wrong, ”commented on the situation in Rapidshare.
“RapidShare is one of the most popular sites in the world. Every day, hundreds of thousands of users rely on our services to pursue their very legitimate goals and interests. Therefore, it is obvious that Google has gone too far with censoring results and an additional algorithm. The results of the search engine should take into account the interests of users, not the interests of Google or someone else, ”the company added.
RapidShare really buzzed Google. It is clear that this filter is the result of coercion by the entertainment industry, whose interests do not coincide with the interests of users. Now that Google has begun to censor services for commercial reasons, more companies will demand the same. At the same time, the entertainment industry will continue to force Google to go even further and censor the search results themselves.
Obviously, Google decided that their users should not search for anything using the BitTorrent keyword, so why then display any results for this search? This is the beginning of the end.
Jamie King, founder of Vodo - a platform on which artists can post their work and show them to millions of people for free - agrees with this assessment. During a Google search for one of their completely legal releases, the site suggested the word "torrent" with a link to the page to download, but this is no longer there.
“Google has already demonstrated that it is ready to be censored for a good price - China immediately appears in the mind. Now they do it for MPAA & Co., ”said King.
“It's simple: our favorite search company doesn't care much about helping the thousands of independent creators who use BitTorrent to distribute legal, freely available files, but they care about protecting the interests of Big Media in their death agony” .
Indeed, Google went the wrong way, censoring services willingly and extensively to appease a few large companies. This is not a way to get rid of piracy, it is a way to create a controlled Internet. Google might be proud to have left China because of its political censorship, but they should be ashamed of advertising commercial censorship all over the world.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/112646/
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