In one of my original reactions to the Google Spain ruling on the Right to be Forgotten, which I wrote for The Justice Gap, I said that Google’s response to the ruling was going to be very interesting:
“They have creative minds working for them – if they can rise to the challenge and find a way to comply with the ruling that enables ordinary people to take back a little control, that could be a very good thing. If, instead, they retrench and withdraw – or go over the top in allowing censorship too easily, it could be very bad.”
From what I’ve seen so far, it looks as though they’ve taken the ‘over the top’ approach, and are allowing censorship too easily.
Two particular stories have come out this week, one from the Guardian (here), the other from the BBC (here). In both cases, the journalists concerned are high profile, influential and expert – James Ball at the Guardian and Robert Peston at the BBC – and the stories, to be frank, do not seem to fall within the categories that the CJEU ruling in the Google Spain case suggested might be suitable for the right to apply. James Ball’s stories were mostly pretty recent – from 2010 and 2011 – as well as being fairly easy to argue as being ‘relevant’ in terms of public interest. Robert Peston’s stories are not so recent, but even more clearly relevant and in the public interest.
So why have they been caught by Google’s net as appropriate for the ‘right to be forgotten’? It looks very much as though this is the intentional overreaction that I was concerned about in my original posting for the Justice Gap. They’re trying to say, I think, ‘you know, we were right! This ruling means censorship! This is dangerous!’ They’re also trying to get journalists like James Ball and Robert Peston to be on their side, not on the side of the CJEU – and in Ball’s case, at least, they seem to be succeeding to an extent. Peston is more critical, saying that Google’s implementation of the ruling ‘looks odd, perhaps clumsy.’
Clumsy or intentional?
I’m not convinced that it’s clumsy at all, but intentional. I hope I’m wrong, and that, as Google themselves have said, they will be refining the method and sorting out the details. If they’re really trying to fight this, to prove that the ruling is unworkable, we’re in for some serious trouble, because the ruling will not be at all easy to reverse. Rather the opposite – and the wheels of the European legal system grind very slowly, so the fight and the mess could be protracted.
What’s more, what this should really highlight for people is not just the problem with the Google Spain ruling, but the huge power that Google already wields – because, ultimately, it is Google that is doing this ‘censorship’, not the court ruling. And Google does similar things already, though without such a fanfare, in relation to copyright protection, links to things like obscene content and so forth. Google already are acting like censors, if you see it that way, and without the drama of the right to be forgotten.
What can we do now?
In the meantime, people will develop coping mechanisms – or find ways to bypass Google’s European search systems, either going straight to google.com or using alternatives like duckduckgo, or even not using search at all, because there are other ways to find information such as crowdsourcing via Twitter. The more people use these, the more they’ll like them, and the more they’ll move away from Google. I hope that Google see this, and find a more productive way forward than this excessive, clumsy implementation of the ruling.
What’s more, I hope they engage positively and actively with the reform process for the Data Protection Regime – because a well executed reform, with a better written and more appropriate version of the right to be forgotten (or even better, the right to erasure) is the ultimate solution here. If that can be brought in soon – rather than delayed or undermined – then we can all move on from the Google Spain ruling, both legally and practically. I think everyone might benefit from that.
This post originally appeared on Paul Bernal’s Blog and is reproduced with permission and thanks
I don’t feel confident in having new Good Google God on the planet ,who can exterminate the past & predict the future. I don’t have or feel much confidence in Google being the new judge & jury on the past & present of humanity !
p.s. I am an agnostic socialist awaiting a new beginning !
The ruling was flawed and Google is in a no win position.
If information is legal to publish, it should be the end of the matter and there should never be any requirement to take it down.
I hope information repositories for ‘forgotten’ information are set up in the US.
EU can’t touch American companies enjoying protection under § 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
There is a recent ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Jones v. Dirtyworld putting teeth back into service provider immunity.
Will the right to be forgotten impinge upon paid for database services such as Lexis-Nexis?
Thought not. So the law is a means of creating information haves and information have nots.