Little’s justified rage at Google’s response
Andrew Little is quite angry. This used to get him in trouble – remember ‘Angry Andy’? – but as a Cabinet minister it works out quite well, especially when the target of his ire deserves it.
Google deserves it. It’s easy to see how a company that automates almost everything it does could pick up a suppressed name that many in New Zealand were searching for and put it in a trends email, as the company did last year during the first stages of the Grace Millane murder trial.
Mistakes happen. But Google’s actions since that mistake have been atrocious. First it sent a local rep to talk to Little, seemingly keen to show it cared. The rep then ducked out of a press conference with journalists as soon as the questions got tough.
This week it became clear that after promising to follow up last year, the Government had to contact Google twice to get any kind of actual response. That response was a single paragraph letter making no offer of any change, instead simply noting that the situation was ‘‘relatively unique’’ and offering a link to a support page, as if Little was a complaining customer and not the justice minister of a sovereign
nation where you make hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
So Little is angry, angry enough to release the pitiful email and talk to journalists about it. ‘‘To get that response six months on ... Clearly they are not taking it seriously,’’ Little said yesterday.
‘‘It goes to the core of the integrity of our justice system. Someone has got to stand up and defend it. We might be a small country and Google might be huge and there’s the rest of the world, but this is an issue that is affecting other countries too.’’
In fairness to Google, it is hard to see any clear solution in this case. There is no current pipeline of suppressed names that goes to Google and other media outlets; journalists instead have to either be in the room when the suppression order is made or call up and be told about it by the court. That process works fine for journalists but is unintelligible for a computer.
And yet Google search results in New Zealand continue to show overseas media reports that identify the accused in the Millane case. They should know about it by now.
Little makes the point that every media outlet in New Zealand manages to respect suppression orders, and if they didn’t would be hauled up in front of a judge for contempt of court, and criticised by police for possibly ruining a prosecution.
He hammers home the point that Google, for all of its automation, cannot pretend to be a neutral platform – a point Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made after the Christchurch terror attack. ‘‘They’ve kind of in the past described themselves as the wire between the news gatherer and news printer. They are not. They are a publisher,’’ Little said.
Like Ardern, he is now promising to bring this up with other justice ministers around the world, as Ardern did with the social media call.
While Little’s anger is justified, it is also politically useful. Much of New Zealand retains a seething rage in the followup from the massively publicised Millane case – and this gives us somewhere to channel some of that anger into.
Politicians all over the world are realising there is little repercussion for attacking tech companies, as most people who don’t work for them can see they have taken on too much power with too little responsibility.
The problem is that these companies are simply too big and too dominant for negative headlines in a place like New Zealand to matter. If that was the case they would probably pay their taxes.