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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 15 2019, @05:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the do-no-evil-only-when-it-suits-us dept.

"Give us torrents or give us freedom!" Cried absolutely no one in Australia after Google decided to start filtering out torrent site results from search queries submitted from Australian locations.

The tech giant has voluntarily agreed to remove sites that facilitate copyright infringement from its search results, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. Google has reached a voluntary agreement with Australian ISPs and content rights holders to de-index sites that have been blocked by internet providers under recent laws.

With the search giant of the internet on their side local content owners will no longer need to jump through hoops and costs to petition for sites to be occluded based on a purely voluntary agreement between ISPs and and content owners. The Australian Federal Government introduced laws in 2015 for blocking sites deemed to be breaching copyrights, following up in 2018 with 65 sites and over 378 domains blocked. This way of dealing with the issue has been roundly criticized for years by interested parties.

In response to this recent agreement a spokesperson said "Google supports effective industry-led measures to fight piracy," while local content representative Graham Burke has said that "Google is leading people to the back door" "shamelessly facilitating crime by leading people to pirate sites" while everyday Australians follow the advice of a former Communications Minister and just use a VPN making the filtering by Google moot.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:29PM (2 children)

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:29PM (#843939)

    Even better, make it decentralized and hook it up to darknets like TOR, Freenet, etc. Don't make it purely piracy, or black market based either. Search terms and domains that are blocked by governments should be covered by the service (with the exception of the nasty bullshit like KP).

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 15 2019, @07:39PM (#843945)

    Already attempt some level of that, metasearch, distributed search, etc. Apache Solr(?) can do per site search results and network together for aggregated results I believe.

    As much as I would like to see a fully decentralized search network, it is more likely to succeed as a non-profit driven project than attempting to get another p2p project off the ground. As it is right now we are already seeing IRC, bittorrent, Tor, and I2P all dwindling in interest. There are a lot of other p2p projects out there in various states of interest and progress, but from what I have seen none are becoming ubiquitous on account of their decentralization along. 'Marketed Faux Privacy' seems to have plenty of mindshare and traction.

    In order for a search engine, even a decentralized one, to succeed, it is going to need default search links in major browsers, android/iOS search app/widget/plugins, and enough financial pull to seed the critical mass of nodes to make it interest the niche users and then the mainstream populace. It took Mozilla... 5-7 years to succeed after Netscape, and they only did because of Google Financing and some punk kid writing Phoenix (which became Firefox, and was originally native GTK(2?) not XUL!) If it hadn't been for that clean sheet browser design Mozilla would have died as the Netscape Browser Bundle and its Mozilla rebadge (I don't even remember what it was called, but it sucked BADLY.)

    Soylent Search Engine seems needed even if only as the seed to a more advanced and decentralized system, just like the pre-XUL Phoenix builds were.

  • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday May 16 2019, @12:20AM

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Thursday May 16 2019, @12:20AM (#844037) Journal

    Even better, make it decentralized

    Yes, please [yacy.net]

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