Re: @Spartacus
Reread my comment. I did not suggest that they could avoid compliance by blocking their IP range. There is no inherent contradiction between compliance with the law and choosing who wish to offer your services to.
Adam 1,
This is true. However your comment did have the whiff of the Kevin the teenager "it's not fair" about it. Something I often see in commentary on legal disputes between internet companies and the law. And sometimes those comments come from the internet companies' bosses themselves...
There's obviously a lack of trust in politics at the moment. Which puts lawmakers at a PR disadvantage. Also, I don't think society has yet fully decided what the internet is for, and therefore what should be allowed and what should be banned. We're still in the internet wild west phase. Things are changing much too quickly for society, law or politics to keep up.
There's also a lot of utopianism out there. The kind that leads people to say things like, "information wants to be free", or "the internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it". That was all very well when the internet was young, full of academics and a small group of relatively well-off young-ish people. But the internet is big business now. And everyone can be on it. Which means crooks, children, little old ladies, global mega-corps, teenagers, advertising account executives, the whole lot. Will people put up with it being a total free-for-all? I doubt it. Will people demand regulation? I'm sure. Will other people complain about that regulation? That's politics. But the penalties of going mainstream are that the whole of society takes an interest, and then everyone wants their pound of flesh.
Finally, I find it hard to feel sympathy for Google. I don't understand the free-ride that some people seem to give them. Here we have a corporation that makes $10 billion a year. And yet their attitude to the law sometimes seems to be that it doesn't apply to us because... Internet. Like it's a magic word.
They've done lots of things that are good for society. And been well financially rewarded for it. The system has broadly worked in that sense. But their actions have had consequences. Some of those just to competitors. But sometimes effects on real people's privacy. Those people may need some kind of protection. Balancing the competing needs of different groups in society is what politics and the law are about. This whole area of law is going to be a problem for years.
For example, what are we going to do about the millions of teened kids who've posted compromising stuff on the internet, when they come to apply for jobs? Are we going to condemn them to have blighted careers so Facebook and Google can continue to have an easy life? Or are we going to ban companies from looking online when they hire? Those are the 3 choices I can see being available. Now in 20 years, this may be a moot point. Many HR people will have their own compromising pictures in their own past, and probably won't care. But HR people now aren't from that generation, and so didn't grow up with the internet - so their attitudes may not be so generous. That could leave us with a potentially huge social problem that either employers, the internet giants or governments will have to solve. So far the internet giants' attitude seems to be, we've got all your data and it's now ours to do with as we please. I can't see that lasting forever. If they don't cut back on the levels of hubris, then I foresee a painful reckoning, either with the politicians, the customers, or both.