There has been quite a bit written over the past few days about the fact that Google removes various sites from the search indices that it provides in certain countries. My personal favorite, though, is today’s column by the BBC’s Bill Thompson, lamenting that the removal is done without due process. To Thompson, the real solution is “an internet that is properly regulated,” and “where Google and other search engine providers had a legal obligation to provide full and comprehensive results to the best of their technical ability and to inform searchers of any areas where content had been removed from their index on legal grounds.” Huh?

Hey, Bill, who’d regulate it? Would it be the United States (where, rather than restricting search engine returns, we just try to ban information from the net entirely)? The EU (whose restrictions on speech are what currently have Google caught up in this mess)? How about China? Oh, yeah; obviously, it’d be the United Nations, with an international court and police unit that would enforce the regulations.

Holy pie-in-the-sky idealism, Batman…