After climbing for a year and a ,Google shares fell 8.5 percent on Friday to $399.46 a share. It was the largest one-day percentage drop for the company and the highest volume -- more than 41 million trades -- since August 18, 2004, when the search giant went public.The market move comes one day after news that Google is challenging a U.S. Department of Justice request for Web search data. While Yahoo, AOL and MSN have complied with a subpoena to provide information on random Web searches and Web sites indexed, Google said "no."
The government is trying to resurrect the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which would make it a crime for commercial Web sites to post material that could be deemed harmful if minors came across it, such as pornography. The administration wants the information to help bolster its argument that Web filtering software is ineffective.
Google contends that the government's request for information -- one million random Web addresses indexed by the search engine and all the keywords used in searches for a specified one week period -- is overreaching and too broad. None of the information sought could be traced back to any individual users.
Privacy advocates applauded Google's action, saying that while the government's subpoena covers Web search data that is not personally identifiable, future requests could go further and invade Web surfers' privacy.
