KinderStart Founder Victor Goodman told XBIZ that the call for Google to remove pornography was a reaction to Google counsel claiming KinderStart was "rife with porn" in court.
KinderStart sued Google in March 2006 after KinderStart received a "zero" ranking in the Google index. Claiming that the low ranking led to a 70 percent drop in page views on the KinderStart site, the nine-count suit accused Google of "pervasive monopolistic practices," denial of the site's free speech rights, anti-competitive practices and predatory pricing.
All nine counts were dismissed by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in July, in a 23-page opinion that said, "The court concludes that KinderStart has failed to allege any conduct on the part of Google that significantly threatens or harms competition." But Fogel specifically dismissed some of the counts "with leave to amend," indicating that KinderStart could modify and refile those complaints.
KinderStart filed an appeal with the 9th Circuit April 16.
"We're going to clear our name, and set the record straight," Goodman said. "KinderStart was founded in 2000 as a haven against pornography. Our policy is that if there is ever any [porn] spam on the site, we will instantly take it off. We don't make a penny from pornography, we don't run any pornography ads. We prohibit them. When [Google counsel] said that, we went nuts. Clearly we're not a porn site. They injected pornography into the issue."
Goodman also told XBIZ that Google has discriminated against KinderStart, perhaps in favor of adult sites. "Google ranks all the websites between zero and 10, 10 being the highest. KinderStart is ranked as a zero, which means very unfavorable, bad site, don't go there. Many porn sites are rated with a 5 or better. So it seems like Google is in the pornography business," Goodman said.
Email to Google's press office was not answered at press time.