Google regulation in Germany?

One idea that's been discussed and repelled here before is that search engines are important actors in cyberspace and that Google has in some markets a dominant position - does this mean therefore that it should have legal duties to the public eg, not to censor, or to list all sites, or to ue a certain algorithm for listing?

A German search engine conference has some interesting recent comments.(via The Register)

"German experts at a Berlin seminar this week argued that search engines need to be more regulated. They want companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! to exercise editorial control over their search results and filter out sites with x-rated content or that glorify aggression.
"Mechanisms have to be developed to deal with illegal content and to protect children online," Marcel Machill, a lecturer in journalism at Germany's Leipzig and Dortmund universities, told the Search Engine Workshop run by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation this week."

Google and other search engines can however argue that they offer a safe search option voluntarily - though of course this can be turned off by the user. And it is well known that Google already do block listings which violate local law in (at least) China, France and Germany. But another speaker argued that a "voluntary obligation" is nothing more than a "weak regulation without any sanctions".

More interestingly perhaps though -

"Machill is also clearly troubled by the strong market position of some of the search engines. Google already accounts for 90 per cent of German web searches. In the classic media sector this kind of concentration would be absurd, he says.
"It is important not to let this power develop unnoticed." Machill hopes that Germany will establish a public corporation to build its own search engine with "editorial responsibility" to compete with Google."

Building a national search engine will be a preferable response to regulation of the private sector for many economists and regulators. But national attempts to build search engines (a French effort was documented here a while back) seem inevitably to lag behind market driven efforts Vive la capitalisme!