TechBulletin

A Child Online Protection Act was passed in the United states back in 1998.This act was created to protect children from harmful sexual material on the Internet. The act required adults to enter access codes
to view pornographic material online. The lower courts had blocked the law due to some reason and had since then never taken effect.

The Justice Department issued a subpoena to Google last year. This subpoena requested that Google hand over a broad range of material from its database, which included one million random web address, and all Google searches from any one week period related to pornographic material.The Bush administration claims that it needs this vast amount of information to determine how often pornographic material shows up in web searches, in the administrations attempt to revive the Child Online Protection Act.

Google refused to comply with the administrations request, stating that the release of such information would violate the privacy rights of it’s users and reveal company trade secrets. The U.S. government has indicated that other unspecified search engines have already agreed to release the requested information.

I believe the unspecified search engines are Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Now, the Justice Department sued Google for not releasing documents that might help them track sexually explicit material on the Web.

Looks like everyone is out to get a piece of Google, for one reason or another.