1. search results

2. sponsored ads/links and Google shopping marketplace, which appear separately.

If Google chooses to not accept money from selling X, there will not be X items appearing in the sponsored links (2) section.

But the search itself (1) has always been intended to return the most relevant information, based on the key words.

Without any moral/political judgement, as long as it is legal.

I agree with you that Google should be able to omit whatever it wants, but I can't agree that "Shopping is not search". Google isn't directly making money on things people buy, it's selling ad space on its search engine. As best I can tell, the primary difference between "Shopping" and "Search" is that Shopping uses structured data from third parties while Search uses unstructured data and attempts to automatically determine semantic contents. From a consumer's perspective, it's still "search".

> Freedom of speech requires freedom from compelled speech.

As a libertarian (and a fairly extreme one at that), I completely agree with you. So would virtually all of my friends who consider themselves conservatives. Their immediate response to this argument would not be ideological, but practical - how is it fair to claim that Google has the right to refuse to participate in speech it deems inappropriate on one hand, while requiring a cake shop to produce a cake that vocally supports gay marriage?

This no longer seems like an issue of "should we compel people to participate in speech"; it's now an issue of "why do we compel speech in only some cases, all of which seem to align with the interests of the Democratic Party?"

> Google is not interested in making money from selling pornography.

This is exactly what I mean by the above. You can search for "porn" on Google Shopping today and get a variety of sexual devices modeled after the genitals of celebrity adult film actors. To my knowledge this has always been the case. As of last week, though, you couldn't get results for a "burgundy tank top" because that string contained the substring "gun".

Very few, if any, on the right are claiming that Google doesn't have the right to do what it wants with its own properties. What they're doing is pointing out the hypocrisy of aggressively blocking only what seems like only those things that are important to the "right", while simultaneously being seen as supporting using the power of government to force those on the right to bow to the demands of the left.

The bottom line is that the core value being exposed here for conservatives is "fairness". Regardless of whether the laws are moral or immoral, the perceived unequal application of those laws along ideological lines is antithetical to their worldview.

As best I can tell, "fairness" and "morality" are completely discrete concept to the right. Some on the right strongly believe that government has no place in legislating morality, others demand that they do so. Both of those groups, however, are outraged when they perceive that the power of government is being applied to the benefit of the left over the right.

From my libertarian perspective, it will be interesting to see how that is reconciled (or ignored) when it becomes general knowledge how the Trump administration has done the same from the other direction. It as, after all, what a large portion of his voters elected him to do. Will the right see it as "turnabout is fair play"? Will they take pleasure in placing the bootheel of government on the neck of the left the way they see it as having been applied to them? Maybe - just maybe - at the end of the day they will be unsettled enough by the implications of this that they'll demand that the power that has been given government and now used against both major ideological groups be revoked by whatever means necessary in order to prevent the escalation of the a cultural civil war where the power of the state itself is being used as the primary weapon.

I pray that it's the latter, but I honestly can't tell at this point.

Nor does it have any effect on the argument here. Google did it in the recent past in China, they do the same thing in the US for politically undesirable content today, and Baidu continues doing it in China. The fact is that we live in an information age, and access to information is gated by the major players. This in turn literally determines what people can learn and what ideas are seen as socially acceptable or not. This amount of propaganda and censorship power is unprecedented.

Google is currently censoring gun purchase related searches in the US, and there's no law requiring them to do it. That should make it quite clear that they have both the capacity and the desire to manipulate public opinion through censorship.