Search Engines Agree to Filter Content in Germany

Urs Gasser, a fellow at the Berkman Center, reports that major search engines such as MSN, Google, and Yahoo! agreed to filter content considered "harmful to minors" in Germany. He points out that the search engines cannot reveal the list of filtered sites and that it's not clear how adults would access this content. While the move is voluntary, the engines key their filtering based on classification by a German state agency and adopted this method to forestall legislation.