From what I've seen, there is a large contingent of Google who doesn't want to provide unfettered access to information. Rather, this contingent wants to socially engineer everyone for the better using their power.
So they are always going to make some people unhappy and the question is who. It used to be people nobody on Hacker News cared about like spammers and click farms (remember them)? But you could still call that censorship or social engineering even then. Isn't getting rid of spam also "using their power?"
Without heavy-duty ranking and spam prevention, would you even use it at all?
So yeah, they have a lot of power, they're getting leaned on by other powerful forces, and we don't need to agree with their choices. But just like a newspaper has to decide on something for its front page (and leave other stuff out), a search engine's gotta rank things.
What happens when these large companies start making people unhappy just because they have the wrong politics? What happens when groups of people within companies like Google start looking the other way when people start to manipulate/SEO page rankings to bury facts and promote their own interpretations of documented facts and science?
It's already happened.
For me, I want pirate sites when searching for piracy and I never want click farm.
Google used to have a simple mission- organize the world information. This means helping you find what you’re looking for. Link farms didn’t do this, they made it harder to find the real thing. If I’m looking for a document and Google knows I want it, and knows the document’s location and doesn’t show it to me, that’s bad. I don’t really care if Google morally doesn’t like piracy, or makes more money by blocking piracy, or whatever. It’s their site, they can do what they like.
But this is why they are worse at their job than they used to be.
One of the reasons I never liked AOL is because their search was like an index through the yellow pages and didn’t use what made the internet so awesome (all the world can connect to each other) and rather was about what was most advantageous for AOL and their advertisers buying keywords.
Wouldn't these people need to be specifically from the search team, and not Google in general (which would have almost no control over search)
That's really the main leverage studios have over Google right now: "either remove the stuff we tell you or you'll no longer get access to the content you want from us."
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that MPAA's board seat on the W3C was sponsored by Google (and Netflix, maybe Microsoft, and a few others).
And now let the down-votes rain in.
This coincided with Android getting a much more restrictive permission regarding removable media (under the label media storage permissions), that made it impossible for non-system apps to write to removable storage (sd cards, usb sticks, etc).