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Instead of the February 27th showdown between the Department of Justice and Google over federal subpoenas taking place, the sitting judge has moved the date back two weeks.

The hotly-anticipated bout between Google and the Feds over parting with information from the Google databases won't happen until March 13th, Silicon.com reported. The DOJ wants to prove the constitutionality of its Child Online Protection Act in federal court, and claims it needs search engine records to do so.

Google has resisted this request, beginning in August 2005 when the subpoenas were issued. While AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo quickly complied with those subpoenas, Google did not and cited user privacy and trade secret protection in doing so.

Without Google's resistance, the DOJ probe would never have went to court, and no one would have ever found out it happened. Until news of its China policy broke, Google enjoyed broad accolades for its stance from the online community.

The article recounted the request from DOJ:

Prosecutors are requesting a "random sampling" of one million Internet addresses accessible through Google's popular search engine, and a random sampling of one million search queries submitted to Google over a one-week period.
Yahoo and Microsoft have both made statements about their disclosures to the DOJ, and said they did not provide personally identifiable information as part of the records surrendered to the Feds.

Those claims were met with a request from EFF co-founder John Gilmore to disclose just what was released. "If Yahoo, MSN, and AOL didn't reveal any personal info to DoJ, let's see them publicly post the results that they sent back to the DoJ," he wrote in a message to Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow, who subsequently posted it online.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.