June 13, 2006 -- New York state officials are cracking down on Internet giant Google for letting kids sneak past parental Internet controls to get hours of explicit porn and gruesome violence with just a click.
Google's new, free-video service -
www.video.google.com - has no oversight but was originally billed as "family fare" when it was launched six months ago in order to build a free-wheeling universe of video swappers.
But its increasingly explicit trash - ranging from frontal nudity to horrific videos of people being crushed fatally by freeway traffic - has set off outrage at the New York State Consumer Protection Board.
The regulatory agency is preparing to issue a formal warning to parents as early as today to block home computers from the unsuitable videos, which users can access regardless of parental censoring.
Although Google's main Web site, Google.com can be governed by parental controls that block porn, violence and other restricted fare, its video site has no such controls.
Without any searching, a user just types in the video Web site to bring up hundreds of videos in rankings that change several times an hour, depending on the volume of viewers.
Among racy videos are: teens doing stripteases on home blogs; semi-nude young lesbians in the throes of embrace; and numerous amateur video clips of women exposing and fondling themselves.
Some videos are crudely sickening, such as a heartbreaking video, "Alien Child," showing a deformed infant without eyes - just bulging red membranes in the sockets, and only a tiny navel-like opening for a mouth - vainly attempting to suckle a baby's bottle.
"It's fairly easy to find [explicit] videos throughout the Internet, but it's certainly another case for Google to organize these videos and present them so freely on a single Web page," said Teresa Santiago, chairwoman and executive director of the state agency.
"Parents have a hard enough time policing the Internet without Google's video service making it easier for children to see and save these types of videos," she said.
Google defended its new video site as an evolving test, and said it has removed numerous objectionable videos when alerted to them. The company acknowledged on its own Web site that it doesn't yet have a filter to block minors from the filth.
Google said it is attempting to set up a system to review and censor the huge volume of videos submitted by tens of thousands of users without offering any other details.
Santiago said that wasn't enough. "We think Google's video should show more discretion in the presentation and accessibility of unusable videos," she said.
Another agency official said the state has held three conferences with Google executives to solve the porn problems, but "is just getting the runaround from Google."
As an example, a long list of trashy videos cited by the state was yanked by Google in recent days, but reappeared yesterday under a new gouging called "movers and shakers."
