But the hypocrisy in this case is that when you see the U.S. doing it, it is bad; but when the EU does it, it is good because the U.S. is doing something bad. The only coherent principle you’re arguing is that you’re angry with America.
The book can remain in the library, but nobody is allowed to tell you where it is, eh?
No, Roe v Wade had nothing to do with censorship of publicly available information. Get real.
But the case in question is that the information is that “the articles are not visible to internet users in France, but are to anyone based outside the country.” The article continues, “Mr Shefet said that it was important for the parent company to remove the articles from its entire network because his firm has a global reputation.”
According to the article, the judge is contemplating penalizing Google in the United States because someone in Singapore might come to a poor opinion of Mr. Shefet. That a French person believes a European judge has the power to protect his reputation worldwide through a third party in the United States is beyond strained – it’s downright bovine constipation.
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But the USA does the same and worse. If a British banker funds an organisation that is not approved by the USA, they feel free to seek extradition and try them in US courts (which the one sided US/UK extradition treaty allows).
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Which other countries refuse to do. Good grief this is a terrible analogy, if that’s what it was supposed to be.
Again, terrible analogy…it’s not even close to synonymous with your OP.
When you are in our yard you play by our rules. And when we are in your yard we do the exact same thing, despite your handwavage and attempt to change the goal posts with your ridiculous analogies. We aren’t talking about trying to extradite people we feel have broken the law or prevent entities from shipping in drugs from other countries here, we are talking about you wanting the rest of the world to limit their free speech and honor your ridiculous rules because you have a bug up your collective asses. As I said, if you don’t like it fucking build your own Great Wall of China and cut yourselves off from the rest of the world, having only your own internal browsers and social media that you can carefully monitor and censure. You know that’s what you all really want, so fucking do it already and see how it works out for you.
No. I think both sides over react and get over sensitive over such issues. There will always be differences between nations and they need to be sorted out in some manner. If Google wants to operate in Europe it wll have to abide by European laws, no matter how stupid they seem to Americans. And vice versa, European companies who do business in the USA have to abide by US laws no matter how stupid they seem to Europeans. There is a level playing field in the stupidity stakes- no one polity has all the answers.
That is capitalism and the law. If Google wants to do business in Europe, it must obey European Law if it wants to avoid massive fines. Their choice. The European Judge cannot force Google to do it, but can make Google doing business in Europe prohibitively expensive.
The issue here is that you’re extending privacy rights to the point that the right of a free press is destroyed. Large amounts of media, and growing, is consumed through indexing services. If news articles that deal with private persons are not allowed to be indexed then free press too must not be allowed.
It’s not a smart law. It’s unambiguously dumber than laws where the United States asks for extradition for financial or technical crimes which are committed remotely but utilizing American resourcesl, which makes it far more obvious they are in American jurisdiction. Whether or not a country should extradite is 100% the purview of how they choose to negotiate an extradition treaty, and a matter of national decision making. Has nothing to do with American law, but anyone hacking into American computers or committing financial crimes transacted over the American financial system absolutely are under our jurisdiction. Now, if they are physically removed from our reach, then we would simply have to hope some day they come here so we arrest them. But that doesn’t make the laws stupid.
If Google wants to do business in Europe, it must comply with Europe’s Laws. Simple. They may choose not to comply but that involves consequences.
I do not necessarily think that the Law is the best one, or even a good one, but I do think that an independent state or group of states has the right to require foreign countries to comply with its law if it is going to do business there. If Google wants to do business in Europe, it has a simple choice.
Again, the USA has been doing exactly the same thing for a long time. You want to operate in the USA? Then don’t do business with Iran, pay up full price for your Argentinian bonds, don’t deal with these Russian official, give the IRS data on your customers, etc…
If you have an issue with the method, it’s a bit late to wake up.
Again, if Google doesn’t want to do that, it’s perfectly free not to do business in the EU. And if you don’t want Google to do that, you’re perfectly free to ask them to choose this option.
And of course, you think Google was denied its rights by the complaining party, but the French judge thought it was the complaining party that was denied his rights by Google. What makes your opinion inherently better than his, the right you like better than the right he likes?
There seems to be a gulf here, I don’t actually see anyone saying that judges in France should ignore the law. The judge here applied it correctly. I don’t see anyone saying Google should intentionally break French law, either.
We’re saying the law is stupid, principally because it castrates the press (not Google), financially I doubt Google cares at all whether it indexes these stories or not and is actually making a stand for the open internet as a principle. In response you guys just keep repeating “but it’s the law.” No one doubts it is the law, nor do we doubt what the laws are in Iran and China. Both countries have laws that need to be changed and should be changed. America has many as well. This is an example of bad law that will make Europe less free and more technologically backward, and further will make it less able to freely disseminate information. This isn’t a law that slaps Americans or America in the face, Google returns none of its overseas profits to the United States, so it actually doesn’t affect us at all. Additionally, Google makes money off of click advertisements served on its search results, the removal of news articles from those results likely doesn’t affect its bottom line at all. This law doesn’t hurt Google or us, it hurts freedom in France and the EU.
In fact, we don’t really know that. A “tribunal de grande instance” is a first level court. The ruling will very probably be appealed.
I answer that because people here are protesting the method, stating it’s totally unacceptable that the activities of Google outside France (and in turn theselves as Google users) could be affected in any way by a French ruling.
Posters in this thread haven’t just criticized the “law” (which isn’t a law but an ECHR ruling) itself, they criticized vehemently the way it is implemented.
I’ve always been less than sanguine about the US asserting “global jurisdiction”, and in general about all instances of defining “presence” so as to submit someone to a jursdiction to which they never acted to become subjects. This goes all the way from the Cuban embargo down to states and counties wanting to collect sales taxes and commuter income taxes on anything that even gets within line of sight of their borders.
Indeed. It’s an attempt at constructive deletion. A majority of people these days arrive at information through the search box index, not by looking up primary web sources.
Hmmm… anyone got any idea if THAT would satisfy the French “rights” position? Or would it still be considered not enough because a skilled enough user could circumvent access and reach some other version of Google? Because if this is as quoted…
(emphasis mine) …then it WOULD seem that the demand is absolute, worldwide compliance beyond merely stopping access from within EU jurisdiction.
(OTOH, the USA was also, internally, one of the leaders in “product disparagement” litigation, which I never thought much of. This is that logic taken to the extreme in the case of persons in the global Web age.)
Is the idea to revert to the standard by which an article published about me in the newspaper or a story about me on the TV news would proceed to sit in the vault of old papers and old tapes (and in the case of the tapes, maybe eventually be overwritten) and looking it up would require someone going into the vault and looking up various in-house indexes and putting in days of hit-and-miss research until they find me?
yes, I stated that incorrectly. Google in France is penalized even though it is complying, but if literally anyone else in the world can find the article, then the fine applies. According to the article, the fine applies if someone in Laos uses Google’s computers in California to find the article. How does that involve European jurisdiction?
You mentioned a comparison with sanctions on Iran. Setting aside the fact that the United Nations has endorsed sanction on Iran, the principles are still greatly different. A company could be penalized in the United States if it does business with Iran because Iran is doing things that are clearly violations of generally accepted norms of behavior, such as funding terrorists who have the specific aim to kill innocent civilians, not to mention the whole nuclear arms things. In this case, the extraterritorial law is being applied because someone is saying mean things about someone else. How are those actions in any way comparable?
FWIW, I think any US law that would penalize a foreign company for doing business in Cuba, simply because Cuba is run by commies, is simply silly. It isn’t like Cuba is a state sponsor of international terrorism.
Aren’t court proceedings public? Is google told to remove a link but then tell nobody what links have been removed? Can the court rulings enjoin Google employees in non-European countries from releasing such lists? After all, it’s not just a matter of removing the links, a list of forbidden links has to be kept in Google’s databases so that it’s bots don’t end up crawling and reindexing them after they’re removed. Even if Google makes it a firing offense to release such lists, releasing them anonymously wouldn’t be difficult.
Also, sites that know they have pages banned could publicly release the links.
Keep in mind also that things can happen inadvertently that cause a reindexing of the content. A website may innocently (or otherwise) reorganize their content so that the banned content now has a new URL which Google’s bots will then blindly crawl and reindex. Will Google be fined if this happens?