Google's Big Takedown

Scott Hardie | May 17, 2014
I am appalled by the EU court ruling against Google, forcing it to comply with takedown requests.

Certainly, I understand the need to leave behind your own past. These days, if you make a mistake that's recorded online, you'll never ever live it down. Criminals who serve their time should have a fair chance to re-enter society, and if the worst members of society deserve another chance to move on from the past, shouldn't we all?

But this ruling feels very much like a dangerous way to go about it, opening a Pandora's box of malevolence online. A business that gets bad reviews or a fine by regulators could effectively hide that information from prospective customers. A former criminal whose past really does matter, such as someone seeking elected office, shouldn't be able to conceal it from the public. There need to be very clear distinctions made as to what information should and shouldn't be removed from Google's results, rather than just granting any request made by an EU citizen, and from what I've heard so far, this ruling doesn't provide those distinctions.

Part of what draws me to this case is the (to me) interesting question of whether Google deserves separate legal treatment as a search engine than ordinary web sites receive. If some privately operated web site displays some embarrassing information about you, you can write to them and ask to have it removed, and they should comply. (I didn't used to comply when someone asked me, but I have changed my ways, both removing some content by request and building granular privacy controls.) When they refuse to comply, you should be have the option of suing them to take it down and having a judge decide on their right to free expression versus your right to privacy. But what about Google in that question? If Google is merely a search engine, then suing them to hide the content is an inappropriate workaround for the problem, burdening them with the cost of privacy that the originating web site should have to bear; it would be like suing the bulletin board manufacturer if one of your neighbors tacked up an embarrassing photo of you in view of the sidewalk. But if Google is a web site, and it is held to the same standards that all web sites are, then isn't the serving of embarrassing information about you an equal violation of your privacy on par with the originating source? Shouldn't you have the option of suing them to remove it like you would from any web site? Given that my professional and personal lives are spent largely online, this is an interesting paradox to me.

I get that this particular case was decided largely on European legal intricacies that are irrelevant here, and that it is highly unlikely that Google will change its results in America. But I'm still disappointed that the ruling seems to have been made so carelessly, with insufficient regard for the ramifications for how people use the Internet to learn important information about the society that they live in. One of the key principles of our nation is that a free press is essential to democracy, and I would argue that a free Internet has become essential too.

Scott Hardie | May 18, 2014
Follow-up to the last thought there: Is the Internet a news-sharing tool, in which case the government forcing Google to censor certain links is a violation of freedom of the press, akin to ordering a newspaper to stop covering someone who asks the newspaper to stop? Or is the Internet an information-expression tool, in which case this ruling is a violation of free speech? Or is the Internet a people-connecting tool in which we communicate and learn from each other, in which case this ruling is a violation of freedom of assembly? Again, Europe's legal principles are very different than ours here (they favor more censorship and more privacy), but in trying to think about all of the ways in which this court ruling against Google is wrong, I keep coming back to the first amendment, but from different angles. It's one of the key foundations of American morality.