Google cracks down on racist sites

Search giant Google has removed a number of controversial sites from its French and German listings.

Websites which are anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi, or related to white supremacy have been removed from Google.de and Google.fr in accordance with strict laws in those two countries.

Another fundamentalist Christian site, which adamantly opposes abortion, Jesus-is-lord.com, has also been banned.

Nate Tyler, spokesman for Google, said: "To avoid legal liability, we remove sites from Google.de search results pages that may conflict with German law."

Under German law, the publication of Holocaust denials and similar material is considered to incite racial and ethnic hatred and is therefore illegal. In the past, Germany has ordered ISPs to block access to US websites that post revisionist literature.

France has similar laws, which allowed a students' anti-racism group to successfully sue Yahoo! in a Paris court for allowing Third Reich memorabilia and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf to be sold on the company's auction sites. In November 2001, a US judge ruled that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech protects Yahoo! from liability.

Declan McCullagh writes for News.com