I should add that after seeing the page, I totally understand Shefet’s position, and I understand that countries have defamation laws and want to be able to protect their citizens from such things. But I’m also very troubled by the idea of countries trying to exercise some kind of extra-territorial jurisdiction like this and I think that either they will ultimately fail or we’ll end up with either a balkanized internet or one reduced to the country with the most restrictive regulations.
I suppose that one answer would be for people to learn to think a lot more critically and to dismiss things they see on the internet that lack proof, but I don’t hold out much hope for that.
Maybe countries need to negotiate treaties concerning defamation laws, making it possible to remove the actual content.
I’ve said a few times already that forbidding Google to index publicly available information is censorship. Not a slippery slope to censorship, mind you. Stopping Google from providing the search results to all the non-France areas of the world is literally censorship.
Furthermore, it seems that a number of folks who support the EU’s right to be forgotten premise their support on scenarios in which an innocent person is defamed. I can understand that to a degree, but it seems like a good number of the claims that are being filed relate to people who actually did something wrong and don’t want others to know about it. Various articles have talked about people who have been convicted of crimes simply not wanting people to know about it.
Regardless of the sympathy I have for people who have been defamed, it seems totally bonkers to me to have people be able to hide the truth from the rest of the world.
The problem with that argument is that the whole thing is based on an incorrect premise. It is not at all a casual matter of someone just wanting to “hide the truth” and that really misrepresents the reality and the intent of the ruling. It’s based on very specific, narrowly defined circumstances where, as said above, snippets of information can become widely available to a large audience and easily interpreted out of context, and moreover… (from the link in the previous post):
It’s simply trying to counter the power of newly emergent technologies and their potential for abuse with reasonable and carefully limited regulation.
So to my mind, this has the same narrow application as, for example, carefully circumscribed laws against hate speech – laws which incidentally most countries have in some form, and the US notably does not, for the same ideological reasons that the EU ruling is being misinterpreted.
And what has been the effect of those laws, to explore the example?
I’ve haven’t seen any chilling effect on freedom or impairment of democracy. On the contrary, the one case I can think of in Canada involved a foreign neo-Nazi who was a holocaust denier and was actively trying to organize violent attacks on the Jewish community; he was tried and convicted under the hate speech laws and duly deported. Good riddance. Whose freedom did that impair? Certainly not mine. And certainly not that of the law-abiding Jewish community, who could now enjoy the freedom to not be terrorized.
By contrast, the lunatic Fred Phelps was able to win a Supreme Court victory allowing him to continue to spew homophobic invectives and picket the funerals of fallen soldiers. Even worse, and pushing the bounds of believability, when a gang of racists burned a cross in the front yard of a black family in St. Paul while yelling hate-filled racist invectives, and they were prosecuted under a city ordinance, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 1992). According to right-wing hardliner Antonin Scalia, what they did was constitutionally protected.
I am literally at a loss for words when confronted with this kind of unthinking dedication to the unbridled fervor of pure libertarian religiosity.
I can see the logic of hate speech laws, even though they are simply not compatible with our First Amendment. If a country outlaws Nazi propaganda, I’ll be the last to complain. Their country, their rules.
But the issue here is much like a country having a law against hate speech showing up in Internet searches in that country (which I’m reluctant to criticize) but then saying that Google has the responsibility to eliminate hate speech for searches conducted outside of that country. It’s just plainly ridiculous to say that an EU policy should apply worldwide in that way.
wolfpup, I think what’s bothering some of us more isn’t so much the censorship (if it can be called that), it’s more the attempt to apply a country’s laws and court rulings to other countries. If this is allowed then what’s to stop countries from pressuring Google to de-index other types of speech worldwide? For me, it’s not so much about the “right to be forgotten” or cases of defamation, it’s the idea of countries trying to force their laws on citizens of other countries when those citizens have no representation in the country doing the pressuring.
Quite true, this thread is nominally about the jurisdictional issue. I was motivated to post my comment in response to the fact that the conversation was drifting to the topic of the justification for the original ruling, and its enforceability. I thought it was worth pointing out that (a) it did seem to have a justification when its well-constrained narrow context was understood, and that (b) the court wasn’t trying to completely ban or censor the information but rather to counter Google’s ominous technological ability to headline obscure and relatively irrelevant items in ways that were unnecessarily and unfairly harmful. In that capacity, Google could sometimes unintentionally function like a malicious and irresponsible tabloid.
'Nuff said. I agree, the jurisdictional question is a tough one. Personally I think Google should just voluntarily comply with reasonable requests like this worldwide, and problem solved. Don’t we all have at least some emissions-control or other features on our cars that arise from California mandates because it’s just easier to make them all that way? And some states seem to have just adopted the California standards because it’s easier than drafting their own. I see no real reason to get all worked up about it, unless someone is once again going invoke the “slippery slope”.
Well, plenty of us find it a poor ruling on the merits and unacceptable on the jurisdictional issue as well. The reason to “get worked up about it” is because it’s prima facie censorship even if it never gets extended, and it very well may be furthered.
Here’s something I don’t understand. The page I found through Yahoo, which contains a couple of posts accusing Shefet of Fraud and claiming that he lost his license, is on a site that claims to operate out of Austria. Isn’t Austria in the European Union? Can’t the ECJ simply order the posts removed? Is that not within their jurisdiction? Apparently France is, so why not Austria? If they can act against the French branch of Google, can’t they act against this company in Austria?
Well, there was the guy in England who was sentenced for condemning chiropractic.
Morris Dees, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, regarding Holocaust Denial literature, that it should be permitted to be published. Censorship of that could lead to the censorship of other revisionist literature.
Imagine if someone had the power to forbid the publication of material condemning Christopher Columbus, because that could be offensive to some people. If I’m not allowed to deny one holocaust, what protects my right to speak about another? If the nation of Turkey could prohibit discussion of the Armenian holocaust, for instance.
Whom do you want to trust with the power to determine what speech is intolerably offensive?
And I’ll still say it : it’s nothing new. It’s no different from any company having to be careful with the deal it does with, say, Sudan if it wants to operate also in the USA, despite doing business with Sudan being perfectly lawful in most of the world, and the deal not involving the USA in any way, shape or form. The USA fine the company for its lawful activities outside the USA that the USA condemn. Exactly the same situation as Google.
Google can play by EU rules, or not play in the EU. Its choice. Whether or not you like the right to privacy, there’s nothing unusual about that. The only peculiarity is that you’re familiar with Google and rely on Google, so it impacts you, while you typically couldn’t care less about the companies that usually face this problem, because it doesn’t impact you in any way.
For a different example of people being directly impacted, see the recent threads by expatriated American who can’t find a bank because the USA wants all banks worldwide to report informations to the IRS (which might even be unlawful in the country where the bank is operating), or face sanctions in the USA. So, banks just closed the accounts of American citizens, because they prefer to keep doing business in the USA.
I suppose if Google really didn’t want to deal with this issue that could simply close down their European offices and any servers they have there. They could still run Google.eu, Google.fr, etc. from servers in the US or even Asia. All Europe could do is become like China and some other places and put blocks on their internet.
There is a difference with that. The US does this to catch US citizens breaking US laws. The ECJ is trying to enforce their rulings on foreign citizens in foreign countries.
You could still argue about whether or not the US has the right to do it, but it’s not really the same thing as what the ECJ is doing.
That was my argument upthread. Something like Wikileaks or Anonymous will release a list of blocked URLs thus bringing more attention to them than existed before.
No. It enforces it on Google. It just so happens that you’re a Google user and can be impacted. If I’m in the business of selling stuff to Sudan, I’ll be impacted by my bank shutting down operations with this country, even though I’m a non-US citizen not living in the US and dealing with non US citizens not living in the US. The US courts would enforce their rulings on me (per your definition) even though I have no relationship altogether with the USA.
Again, let’s imagine instead a Kazakh internet company producing child porn. If it had a branch in the USA (let’s say this branch, on the other hand, produces only regular porn), do you think that US courts would hesitate for half a second before fining this branch until the company stops making child porn available in the USA?
You’re not accustomed to be potentially personnally impacted by the decision of a French court, and it seems outrageous to you, but there’s nothing outrageous, or even uncommon, about it.
For one specific case, yes, it could (this one, for instance). But once generalized, do you think a lot of people will actively look for people they never heard about previously on whatever site is listing “banned in Europe” links that might be as exciting as “Mr John Smith from Glasgow was arrested for bicycle theft in july 1982”
Regardless, there will almost certainly be someone who does this just because of the controversy engendered. What happens then, does the court order Google to de-index that site? Does Google end up having to automate the de-listing of all pages that link to the banned pages? If so, what happens to sites that innocently and unknowingly link to a banned page?
Do they get dropped from Google? If they want to avoid that, they’ll need a list of links to avoid.
While I agree that people won’t be interested in bicycle thefts in and of themselves, the controversy over the bannings will make such things interesting to people.