Antitrust and Consumer Protection
Competition: Spring 2014, Vol. 23, No. 1
Content
- Chair's Column
- Do First Amendment Principles Limit the Antitrust Agencies' Ability To Prohibit Enforcement of Standards-essential Patents?
- Does the First Amendment Immunize Google's Search Engine Search Results From Government Antitrust Scrutiny?
- Editor's Note
- Judges Speak Out: the Make-or-break Moment of Certifying a Class With Judges Marsha Berzon, Virginia Phillips, John Wiley, and Curtis Karnow
- Landmark Civil Price-fixing Verdicts of 2013: Lessons From the Vitamin C and Urethanes Trials With Trial Counsel and Observers William a. Isaacson, Daniel S. Mason, Joseph Goldberg, and Michael Tubach
- Lcd Redux: Follow-on Class Action and Direct Purchaser Litigation From 2012'S Doj Criminal Prosecutions Views from Trial Experts Bruce Simon, Howard Varinsky, and Robert Freitas
- Masthead
- Noerr-pennington: Safeguarding the First Amendment Right To Petition the Government
- Regulation of Companies' Data Security Practices Under the Ftc Act and California Unfair Competition Law
- The Irrelevance of the First Amendment To the Modern Regulation of the Internet
- The Market-participant Exception To State-action Immunity From Antitrust Liability
- The Misapplication of Matsushita's Heightened Summary Judgment Standard
- The Supreme Court In Borough of Duryea V. Guarnieri Signals a Retreat From Pre's Broad Deference To the Right To Petition
- Trial By Sample: a Post-game, Locker Room Chat Exploring the McAdams V. Monier Trial: a Roundtable With Trial Counsel Jeffrey Cereghino and William Stern
- Update On California State Antitrust and Unfair Competition Law and Federal and State Procedural Law
- First Amendment Protection For Search Engine Search Results
FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTION FOR SEARCH ENGINE SEARCH RESULTS1
By Eugene Volokh2 and Donald M. Falk3
I. INTRODUCTION
Once, the leading sources to which people turned for useful information were newspapers, guidebooks, and encyclopedias. Today, these sources also include search engine results, which people use (along with other sources) to learn about news, local institutions, products, services, and many other matters. Then and now, the First Amendment has protected all these forms of speech from government attempts to regulate what they present or how they present it. And this First Amendment protection has applied even when the regulations were motivated by a concern about what some people see as "fairness."
Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! Search, and other search engines are speakers. First, they sometimes convey information that the search engine company has itself prepared or compiled (such as information about places appearing in Google Places). Second, they direct users to material created by others, by referencing the titles of Web pages that the search engines judge to be most responsive to the query, coupled with short excerpts from each page. Such reporting about others’ speech is itself constitutionally protected speech.