To be fair to Google, it opposed the European court ruling. But its implementation of it looks odd, perhaps clumsy.
I find it incredible that Google is held at fault in this case because they don't choose whether it is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" in a way that fits the author's view. Such an analysis is so absurdly subjective, and it is impossible for Google to satisfy both sides.
The European Court ruling is pure absurdity, and this article could more accurately be titled "European Court Rules That Past Must Be Wiped. Much Comedy As Result."
There is no possible way that Google can implement it that won't endlessly earn them criticism, such as this piece.
Unless Google wants to treat the EU like they did China and redirect all searches to a jurisdiction with actual press freedoms, they're doing all they can here.
Yes, but the problem is that what is a "matter of national security" in practice is whatever the government says it is. So this exception is enough to effectively eviscerate the freedom of the press.
Nobody got in trouble in the U.S. for reporting on/distributing the Snowden leaks. There weren't any newspaper raids. Nobody was asked to "keep quiet". Anyone who did censor did so out of mutual interest.
Press freedoms have not been eviscerated here. It's a trendy narrative, but in reality you have enormous freedom to distribute content which was illegally obtained as per the Pentagon Papers cases and others. The worst thing we have here is cozy relationships between the media and the government, but alternative news sources are available everywhere and Americans are relying on them more than ever.
Just to be clear, NSLs are largely unregulated by the judiciary and are frequently overbroad in the information they demand, but they aren't arbitrary gag orders.
They can keep you silent about the fact that you got an NSL (and that therefore there's an investigation going on), but not about the content itself.
Press freedoms and freedom of speech haven't been eviscerated in the US, true, but neither is the US the bastion of freedom of speech or press that it's promoted as. It's reasonably free, and has some weird corner cases like Westboro Baptist Church's activities, but it's not head-and-shoulders above its contemporaries.
Reporters Without Borders puts the US at 46th position in their Press Freedom Index. An awful lot of things can be turned into "national security" issues.
I'm getting 46 from this page, in the graph and in the text http://rsf.org/index2014/en-index2014.php - where are you seeing 32? I vaguely recall it being around 30 last year.
Those aren't great examples -- it's pretty rare to get taken down for simply reporting on IP issues. You can get taken down for distributing someone else's copyrighted content, but I have yet to see the government go after someone for simple journalism. The closest we've gotten to that was the Dajaz1 domain name seizure, but that was because they served up actual copyrighted songs (though arguably with authorization), not because of their reporting.
That said, there's been plenty of DMCA abuse and unwarranted legal nastygrams against journalists, but as far as I'm aware, in every case where people actually took the case to court rather than just giving in, they've won. Our IP system provides for plenty of opportunities for "extortion by lawyer", but it's a different problem than "press freedom" IMHO.
The "hot news" doctrine is mostly dead these days.[1] And at worst, it delays wide-spread dissemination of news for a day, rather than suppress it outright.
From the linked article: "The United States rejected this doctrine in the 1991 United States Supreme Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service"
I don't really see how it would be contempt of court for Google to shut down its European servers and redirect all its European domains to go to Google.com. It would be a lot of other things, but I don't think it would be contempt of court.
The court ordered Google Inc to remove certain listings. They did not specify "only on certain TLDs" or "only from certain servers." Including them in search results is violating the court order. I guess if Google pulled out of the EU entirely, closing all European subsidiaries, relocating employees and removing all assets, then they could make a case that the court no longer has jurisdiction... that seems like it'd be difficult. IANAL.
Indeed, and if that wasn't enough of a disincentive they'd lose out on the favourable taxation they get from basing themselves in Europe - specifically, Ireland.
Although I understand that the European Commission will soon be focusing their attention on the tax arrangements of some of the Irish-based tech giants (Apple, Google etc.)
Check out the Guardian story, which has screenshots of the two side by side (or try their example directly by searching for "Dougie McDonald Guardian" on google.com vs google.co.uk. Ignore the news articles, just look at the missing top stories).
> I don't really see how it would be contempt of court
Well I do, and I can guarantee you that courts would see it too. In Europe, laws generally aren't to be interpreted by the letter. You can't game them with technicalities (well it depends, but in this case it's quite clear).
> In Europe, laws generally aren't to be interpreted by the letter.
That's a very general statement and generally untrue (although you are in this case, partially correct). Acts and statutes are always interpreted by the letter, you are perhaps confusing this by making a comparison of these EU statutes with common law or jus commune as that is interpreted by "the spirit of the law" (usually informed by case-law, constitutions etc. depending on the country).
Acts and statutes are not common law (or natural law), and these EU measures are enabled by acts and statutes in each separate EU member state. So they are indeed interpreted to the letter as these acts must be implemented in states with codified constitutions (where one court has supreme interpretation of a constitution and must apply EU law with direct effect, although the big ones haven't done this till recently) and ones without (where there is an indirect effect of law). This is known as the Supremacy Doctrine[1]. The only exception is when the interpretation comes from the European Court of Justice.
The part you are absolutely right about, is that in this specific case, interpretation will not be up to each member state as this amendment was straight from the European Court of Justice. Generally, however, as far as "European law" goes, until we have an actual constitution or become an actual federation, your general statement is untrue most of the time (lets not forget the EU is enabled by treaties and if you don't think the letter matters in a treaty then I have come contracts I'd love you to sign...)
Well that was my entire point: that Google was doing everything it could to fight the EU's "right to be forgotten" short of simply deciding (like they did with China) to stop operating a search engine in EU's jurisdiction.
My point is that stopping operating their search engine in the EU, while redirecting European domains to Google.com, and keeping headquarters there, would be contempt of court. Because it's very obviously not following the court's decision. Whereas obeying the court order in Europe but not in the rest of the world is completely normal.
Of course, stopping all operations in EU altogether would be fine too, but they're not going to do that.
Interesting to think that it is in Google's interest to create a clumsy system that does not properly check requested deletions. Too many deletions that have no merit under the scheme will likely create a backlash, placing a negative highlight on the scheme to the average person on the street who will now start to read news article after news article about erroneous deletions.
What the EU is trying to do is likely impossible. But I can't help but think that their intentions are sound. For example, I fully expect a modern society to give a second chance to a difficult teenager that receives a criminal record. Many governments would hide such a record after a certain time.
> For example, I fully expect a modern society to give a second chance to a difficult teenager that receives a criminal record. Many governments would hide such a record after a certain time.
There seems to be a simpler way to accomplish this than the current EU approach: a name change. It seems much easier to have an individual change his or her identity than to have the whole of society collectively agree to not associate a name with some act. You might still need some law to prohibit linking old identities with new ones, but this is vastly more workable than asking third parties to decide if something is "inadequate or irrelevant". It's also less likely to be abused -- e.g. a politician can't censor a prior criminal act while simultaneously getting the benefits of name recognition.
Moreover, since a name change typically requires some sort of administrative petition, it provides an opportunity for judicial oversight. You could make it work like bankruptcy -- you petition the court for a name change, and a judge would decide what aspects of your old identity carrier over to your new one.
That's the point. If there is something so terrible that you feel the need to hide truthful information on the Internet, then the process shouldn't be simple.
Why not? People change their names all the time (e.g. for marriage or religious reasons), so there's existing precedence for this. During the name change process, you get a certificate of name change, so that helps with issues with bank account names, contracts, etc. Your friends and family may still refer to you by your old name, but that's generally not an issue from a "right to forget" standpoint. The only difference would be that the government would seal any records regarding your name change.
Changing your name is, at any rate, easier than making other people forget what you did last summer.
In the US that might be the case, that doesn't make it so in other countries.
In Germany the scenarios in which you are allowed to change your name are all defined by law. While you are allowed to change your name for resocialization or as a protection against harassment, you can get search results removed for reasons that wouldn't allow a name change.
Furthermore changing your name takes quite a bit of effort, asking a search engine to remove search results is a much simpler process.
To be clear, my original post was normative. As a policy, the law should favor name changes over a right to demand Google remove a search listing.
> Furthermore changing your name takes quite a bit of effort, asking a search engine to remove search results is a much simpler process.
Simpler for you, but not for the search engine! Or for society as a whole. More to the point, it should not be easy to erase your name from the Internet. The right to be forgotten is easily abused, and it should be invoked as a last resort not the first.
> For example, I fully expect a modern society to give a second chance to a difficult teenager that receives a criminal record.
They could do that by avoiding judgment on a teenager with a critical record rather than not pretending like that record doesn't exist. And if the problem is that too many people are judging, then it's not true that society at large really does feel the same way about it.
Can't upvote this enough. I see that EU (and in wider sense, many private advocates wrt. discussions about Facebook, et al.) wants to go the way of denying and removing facts, which is both hurtful for the society and not going to work anyway.
The real problem are not teenager's criminal record or photos from drunk partying - the problem are the people who judge others by things like that, many of which are done by everyone else anyway. And if this is the majority of people, maybe we should finally admit that this is a society-wide problem.
The reality is that someone who has 50 applications on his table and wants to invite 5-10 for an interview for 1 position is looking for easy ways to narrow them down.
And over time society will recognise that prejudging applicants based on irrelevant crap unearthed on the Internet isn't the best business strategy, so the original problem diminishes.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! <sniff> Oh, you kill me ... I needed a good laugh.
Reality check. Look at the prevalence of tattoos. Think that the prejudice against that has diminished? As far as I can tell, it's gotten worse.
Before, tattoos were sufficiently rare that if somebody had one who was applying for a job where they were unusual, they generally were given the benefit of the doubt (ex-serviceman, gang member who got out, etc.).
Now, they're so common that they're used as a proxy for "lower socioeconomic status" and all the discrimination that comes with that.
Re: tattoos - maybe that's only a US thing. Visit any finance tower in Melbourne Docklands on casual Fridays and you will see plenty of the early 20s male staff with full sleeve tattoos on display. And I'd guess around 10% of the female staff have small neck or wrist tatts. Ten years ago that would have been completely verboten.
Yes sadly very common in the US. Many employee dress codes require "no visible tattoos", when unfairly penalizes excesses of youth, cultural differences, and people of lower socioeconomic status, who are unlikely to have funds available for tattoo removal.
It doesn't make any business sense to do it any other way. Checking if requests are valid costs money. Following requests blindly costs almost nothing, just a single internet page is lost out of millions. Google makes money off the long tail of advertising, a huge amount that flies under the radar of personal wine and dine deals. They know very well they can't afford to check every request personally.
How does this request not have merit? What makes it "clumsy"? Because the linked author says it is?
Recall that the original action that yielded the right to be forgotten clause was a gentleman who wanted a debt confiscation and sale removed from the public record. The actual national agency told him to get lost -- the data was valid and unchallenged, and is a part of the recognized past, and is fully available and robust if you search them -- but the European Court decided that search engines must, for some reason, erase this past.
Merrill Lynch was absorbed into Bank of America: It no longer exists as an organization. This gentleman has moved on and no longer serves as Chairman or CEO, effectively retired and sitting on apparently a single board.
Is a newspaper article slandering him really relevant (the pertinent demand of the court ruling) to anyone anymore?
Why, if the search engines have to pretend that a man didn't really have property confiscated and sold for debts, do they not have to also pretend that he wasn't a CEO?
Note that European courts really like giving out big fines (especially, it seems, to American companies), so this impossible to judge subjective basis by which items must be deleted is a no-win situation for Google, and of course they must lean to the side of erring to delete. Erring to retain is a legal quagmire.
The incentive Google has is to not get sued for contravening a lawful order of the European Court. I don't see what conspiratorial wagering adds (the implied notions of your first post were obvious to all).
And be sure that every person with the means is going to exploit this immediately to expunge anything negative in their past. Google is in a position of being unable to decide what the European Court, or any other court, might decide is "relevant" (perhaps the court will be willing to offer its services to judge this), so the end result is obvious, no conspiracy needed.
I get what you're saying but given that there has yet to be a fine issued under this scheme what you are describing is also wagering. I am doubtful about any commercial entity's good intentions when it comes to an opportunity to exploit a system to their benefit.
It's not about any one individual site. It's about information being removed altogether. The point is that's essentially impossible - there is no way the information about Dougie MacDonald (and the rest) is going to be suppressed - if anything, this will make it more widely available.
Google in Europe will be known to be censored, there will be Google results to blogs about censored data that will be visible in a plain Google search, even in Europe.
It's "couldn't have" or perhaps "couldn't've" but it's certainly not "couldn't of". Interesting error born of an incorrect interpretation of phonetics.
I find it incredible that Google is held at fault in this case because they don't choose whether it is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" in a way that fits the author's view. Such an analysis is so absurdly subjective, and it is impossible for Google to satisfy both sides.
The European Court ruling is pure absurdity, and this article could more accurately be titled "European Court Rules That Past Must Be Wiped. Much Comedy As Result."
There is no possible way that Google can implement it that won't endlessly earn them criticism, such as this piece.