A court case in France over a Libel trial and the “Right to be Forgotten” decision by the European Court of Justice has resulted in Google facing a Worldwide Take-Down order on a particular subject and individual.
French Google had agreed to remove the offending link but it remained on other sites including in the USA. The court held that as the person had an international presence that could be protected, Google should be required to remove such links worldwide.
The court has imposed punitive damages on Google France should Google not comply with its other divisions. The damages would be approximately $300,000 a year.
This is headed towards a stand-off between US beliefs on Freedom of Expression and European beliefs on the Right to Privacy.
In which case, it will end up with EU rules being implemented since Google has nothing to lose in the US by complying, and something to lose in the EU by not complying.
Doesn’t eBay forbid the sale of nazi paraphernalia for essentially the same reason?
That’s the obvious issue with this sort of situation – that I, outside the EU, may end up with a search engine, or eventually even a whole web if nobody may do business otherwise, that will from now on have the characteristics of wherever is the more information-restrictive profitable market they serve elsewhere. So it’s no longer really a World-Wide Web? It’s a whole bunch of “*Our *Web, and you can only see what we want you to”?
I will admit that I may seem prejudiced in this sense by having all along my life lived under the American principle that the truth is defense in any claim of defamation – that there is no offense, no harm, no wrongdoing, no invasion of privacy per se in having an index entry about where are you referenced on the internet if indeed that reference exists. If someone *uses *that info to harm you then it’s that someone’s offense, not the index’s. Right to Be Forgotten? Why not do it the other way: Right to Not Have Your Past Used Against You?
My puzzlement with the case was, to begin with, that Google is not even the prime keeper of files and information, but an indexer. The information will remain there. And a future indexer may find it and make it available all over again unless the actual host of the information is eliminated. But of course, the Deep Pockets rule applies just as well in a European as an American court, so Google it is that gets taken to court.
Also, in general the notion that it should be legally enforceable *worldwide *that you may only use the web to look up things that are “good” and “right”… scares me.
So is Google bound by the laws of every country where somebody with internet access can access Google? Is China going to make them deindex the Tienanmen Square Massacre across all of Google’s search sights worldwide?
I think this is an issue where a worldwide court ruling is necessary. It makes no sense to have a digital “Right to be Forgotten” if someone in another country can simply access that same information. Everyone has the internet, the internet is the same everywhere, a ruling in France only is meaningless.
I’m against “global courts” in general as they negate state autonomy, but cases like this involving the internet clearly need a global enforcement.
Although, there’s the saying that still rings true: Once it’s on the internet, it’s never going away.
As others have said, it makes no sense that they’re going after Google for this. If they’re going to go after anyone (and I’m not saying that they should), it logically seems like it should be the actual website.
Other search engines will still index the page in question, and other websites will link to it. What will they do if someone like Wikileaks publishes list of these “forbidden links”?
Hell, an enterprising party could get a lot of traffic just by putting up a site with such links. In fact it’s bound to happen. At that point the persons trying to squelch the information will get more publicity than they ever had to begin with.
Will the European courts be able to censor every one of these sites that pops up? Even if they are not located in Europe and do no business with any European nation?
This is a losing battle. They’ll end up making Google less useful while protecting no one.
Yeah, this was a dumb ruling in the first place, and largely unenforceable due to this reason. The BBC has begun publishing a list of the links that Google has removed, and I expect other large news/info websites affected by the removal requests to do the same.