Trump idea on regulating Google 'unfathomable'

His attacks on Google drew headlines, but President Donald Trump would face an impossible task if his administration tried to regulate the leading internet search engine and its news results.

Legal and media experts say Google and other internet firms enjoy the same constitutional protections on free speech as news outlets, precluding any government interference with the search results that displease the president.

"Each search engine's editorial judgment is much like many other familiar editorial judgments," said Eugene Volokh, a University of California-Los Angeles law professor and author of a 2012 white paper on the constitutional First Amendment protection of search engines.

Volokh said in a blog post on Reason.com after Trump's remarks that algorithms developed by Google and others are "editorial judgments about what users are likely to find interesting and valuable.

And all these exercises of editorial judgment are fully protected by the First Amendment." Eric Goldman, co-director of the High-Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, said there is ample legal precedent for Google's free-speech rights.

"Search engines fully qualify for First Amendment protections for their search results. Numerous cases going back over 15 years have confirmed this," Goldman said.

"Any effort by Trump to 'fix' search engine results will violate the First Amendment. It's not even a close question."
Google countered the remarks by saying that "search is not used to set a political agenda and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology."
"Google is a private company with its own algorithms and the government has absolutely no control in how it conducts business," said Ken Paulson, former USA Today editor who heads the Newseum's First Amendment Center and is dean of
"The broader threat to First Amendment freedoms comes when the most powerful man in the world repeatedly says that you can only trust him, not news organisations or the search engines that deliver their coverage."