So Google has become the moral arbiter of all European internet users. This seems odd.
Why are we now trusting the people whose very real interests it’s in, as a competitive company, to have all search results available?
In fairness the latest EU ruling by the Court of Justice, in Luxembourg, does not only apply to Google, but also Yahoo and any search engine provider operating in Europe.
But how will it work?
Basically Google create a ‘special committee’, whose job it will become to assess the validity of individuals requests to have the links to websites which refer to them taken down. It has become known as the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling and it threatens to change the way tech companies operate in Europe, if not the world.
Google have already relented from an initially combative stance toward the decision, and agreed to develop new protocol. This involves creation of a page where users can apply online to have the links to information about them removed. It has been up and running now since Friday and it had already attracted 20,000 fresh requests. It doesn’t take much imagination to assume that this service will be pretty popular.
And there’s another of the problems: Google have, probably rightly, pointed out that this is a manageable inconvenience for them. The size of their business dictates that they can allocate the necessary resources to cope with the new demand. The same is not true for start-ups, with very limited finances (and personnel resources for that matter); therefore the ruling is likely to damage innovation in Europe by hurting the competitive advantage for IT/Tech businesses seeking to get started from European countries.
And this is before we even get to the very real threat to freedom of speech and a free press. Despite what Google have clearly said, about the way the special committee will incline towards refusal of requests from professionals and those in the public domain who seek to cover up their malpractice, one cannot help but fear for the impact on restrictive internet regulation and transparency.
An interesting opponent of the ‘right to forget’ has appeared, in the form of Conservative MP and Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, who has warned of the dangers for internet freedom, saying:
“I have a real reservation about the idea you can somehow eradicate your past, that news organisations are forced to sanitise their archives, that search engines are forced to direct away from difficult stories for people.”
He clearly believes the move will be a step backwards, away from freedom for the press. He went on:
“We live in a world of press freedom. We live in a world where people should be accountable for the mistakes we make. I think the EU as a whole needs to ask some serious questions about whether this is really the right way forward.”
There is a debate to be had about the way the internet is to be regulated and this is almost certainly a misstep, then, from the European Court. Google’s Larry Page certainly believes so (unsurprisingly!). On the impact of the ruling on internet freedom he said:
“It will be used by other governments that aren’t as forward and progressive as Europe to do bad things. Other people are going to pile on, probably . . . for reasons most Europeans would find negative.”
Google accept the ruling but admit a chance was missed to engage the public in this debate in advance of the ruling. They have vowed to make up for this and to become more prominent as a company operating in Europe.
As Page now acknowledges:
“A very significant amount of time is going to be spent in Europe talking.”
Of course, the panel will not be the last line of defence. Individuals and companies who fail to get the desired outcome with a request to the search engine directly can still go to court, and there are already many more cases pending in the European courts.
In fact, the European judges made clear that in their view the EU data protection directive already established a “right to be forgotten”. This appears to pre-empt lengthy negotiations within the EU over a new data protection directive which could establish a limited “right to be forgotten”.
But surely, then, we should be paying some attention to who is on this special committee. After all Google has certainly considers this new system to be a significant development. Larry Page again:
“as we regulate the internet, I think we’re not going to see the kind of innovation we’ve seen”.
Perhaps the most concerning part of this response is the line: “as we regulate the internet.”
Yes – that’s really what Page is acknowledging here. Google are officially responsible for adjudicating over what we can find online. Sure, they’re already controlling what we see, to an extent, by creating and controlling the algorithms that determine how search results are ordered. But this is a shift, to an active, interventionist role. Can that be a good thing?
Remember – Google are a publicly listed company, responsible first and foremost to their shareholders. Their product is only weakened by reducing the totality of search results, of course. So a tension between their new ‘officiating’ position and their vested interests as a competitive company exists.
One prominent member of the new panel will be Wikipedia founder and internet legend Jimmy Wales. He has already spoken scathingly of the ruling:
“I don’t think it’s workable; the ruling applies only to Europe and the internet is global.”
Which pinpoints yet another limitation of the ruling. Yes, another flaw evident from the court’s announcement, that it doesn’t apply outside the European jurisdiction of the court. So anyone going through, say, the US servers will still find links to the excluded information.
So a lot of problems, then. But maybe it will be self-balancing, to an extent, at least. We know that Google will be keen to keep as much of the material searchable as possible – it enhances their reputation to offer a ‘complete’ reflection of what is online; this will be tempered by a panel of professionals who recognise that some results no longer benefit anyone by remaining available (such as the drunken teenage facebook pages, which are likely to be removed on request).
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