In other words, the South Carolina state government wants to profit from pornography. (They're already taxing cigarettes and booze, so why not porn, too?)
Posts by Durant Imboden
13 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2010
Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable
Adblock wins in court again – this time against German newspaper
Google watchers react furiously to ad flinger’s competition case defence
Legal eagles want dirt on Google's 'right to be forgotten' decisions
WHAT did GOOGLE do SO WRONG to get a slapping from the EU?
EU says dominant Google illegally alters search results
Google: Give us cash or we'll poke YouTube ads into your eyeballs
US Senate to probe the Obama-Google love-in
Google Chrome on Windows 'completely unusable', gripe users
Google ordered to tear down search results from its global dotcom by French court
Re: Google should get a declaratory judgement
Back in 2003, in a decision about Search King, Inc. v. Google Technology, Inc., a U.S. district court judge wrote:
"Page Rank is an opinion - an opinion of the significance of a particular web site as it corresponds to a search query. Other search engines express different opinions, as each search engine's method of determining relative significance is unique.....A statement of relative significance, as represented by the Page Rank, is inherently subjective in nature. Accordingly the Court concludes that Google's Page Ranks are entitled to First Amendment protection."
(The judge apparently had some problems with terminology--e.g., "Page Rank" for "rankings"--and the lawsuit was about Google's right to rank or not rank the plaintiff's pages, but the "First Amendment protection" seems pretty clear.)
Is modern life possible without a smartphone?
'Best known female architect' angrily defends gigantic vagina
Google's gatekeeper to collect toll for dying news orgs
Your "straw man" argument
"If all the commercial content producers were to join Murdoch behind a paywall,..."
That's a mighty big "if," for two reasons:
1) In the real world, some content producers would see an opportunity in staying outside the paywall, where they'd have less competition for the larger Web audience after the Murdochs of the world had retreated to their gated community.
2) Your hypothetical scenario smacks of collusion. Would "all the commercial content producers" seek antitrust immunity from the USA, the EU, and other jurisdictions before joining together in a paywall scheme?