Online JCOM Reading 2

In an article I read it talked about high speed internet companies becoming more and more upset with the ease of surfing the internet over AT&T or similar cell phone companies. Their main complaint is that these cell phone companies are not paying for the use of internet and that they should have to in order to maintain this ability to surf it.

These companies are also going as far as claiming that Google or Yahoo should have to pay them in order to be a search engine and whichever pays more will basically become America’s primary search engine. Executives from Google say this is ridiculous in that it inhibits the very nature of the internet and though it won’t be a problem for Google to pay a fee, it may be for small new companies that could be just as successful.

I am a true lover of Google and as I was reading this article I thought it would be horrible if such a tax on the internet had been about when Google was just starting. However, a recent article I read made me examine my true feelings for Google.

This article was about how Google keeps records of what you have searched. Though I did not care too much about this, as I read further I was slightly more disturbed. Apparently, it is possible for a court to subpoena your Google searches and use them against you. A guy in North Carolina killed his wife and part of the evidence that got him convicted was that he had searched the words "neck," "snap," "break" and "hold" before he killed his wife.

I personally think that is a slight stretch. I am not a psycho but I’ve looked up some pretty random things before. I have had assignments for class requiring me to look up things I normally would not search for, and I use Google for nearly every search I conduct. For my criminology class I had last summer I typed in many variations of ‘child murders.’ I personally am not interested in reading morbid stories like this but someone who obtained a record of these searches might think I was a crazy person. I don’t know! It seems crazy that Google can keep these things stored to potentially use against someone at a later date.

The connection between these two articles is that there seem to be no specific laws on how the internet should be used. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which seems would protect against keeping a log of your Google searches, was enacted in 1986. That’s before I was born and way before the internet was widely used. Yet that is the most recent electronic privacy law we have. As for the issue on who gets to use airwaves and whether search engines should pay a fee to internet companies the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is the most recent code of conduct we have.

It is painfully obvious that things need to be cleaned up on the internet. In an age where information can be found in a matter of seconds, our laws have not been changed in decades. It’s time the government catch up with the internet.