James Ashton: Google - regulation is not censorship

Google's battle against regulation has been almost as fierce as its battle against competitors such as Facebook and Microsoft.

It has benefited more than most from the unfettered growth of the internet — something its slick search engine has of course helped to foster.

This privacy deal might well be manna from heaven for PR men who already revel in rewriting the Wikipedia entries of their despot clients. But Larry Page’s gripes should be taken with a pinch of salt.

In agglomerating the world’s information, Google has always acted first, under the cloak of freedom and openness, and dealt with the consequences later. A long-running dispute with Brussels over favouring its own services in search results ahead of its rivals is one example of this.

If trying to be “more European”, as Page puts it, means the company will be more consultative, then that is a good thing. Remember, it has other options. In 2010, Google shut its mainland search service in China when the pressure for self-censorship became too much for it.

It makes too much money in Europe, much of it lightly-taxed, to contemplate a similar move here.