European court: Google can be forced to remove links
Final ruling clouds future of free flow of information online.
The highest European court on Tuesday gave individuals the right to influence what can be learned about them through Web searches, rejecting long-established practices about the free flow of information on the Internet.
Before, people who did not like what was being said about them online needed to go the original source of the information and persuade the website to delete it. That was arduous and often impossible.
But the European Court of Justice said the middleman — the search engine — could be asked to simply delete the links.
In some ways, the court is trying to erase the last 25 years, when people learned to routinely Google every potential suitor, partner or friend. In 1990, finding out the true history of a blind date or busi- ness collaborator was practically impossible.
“It could result in giving people a line-item veto over results on searches about
themselves,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School. “Some will see this as corrupting. Others will see it as purifying.”
He is siding with the former
group, warning that Google research results could become equivalent to About.Me, which allows people to set up links to material about them.
Others argue that search was never neutral and that the ruling is in tune with how people want to live.
“More and more Internet users want a little of the ephemerality and the forgetfulness of the pre-digital days,” said Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of Internet governance at the Oxford Internet Institute. “They don’t want their drunken pictures to follow them the next 30 years.”
The court said data privacy officials in European countries would have the final say on whether a link should be removed but gave no objective standard beyond saying that search links should be “relevant.” It also said Google should err on the side of removing links when requested.
But one person’s relevance is another’s ancient history. Should a businessman be able to expunge a link to his bankruptcy a decade ago? How about five years? Could a wouldbe politician get a drunken-driving arrest removed by calling it a youthful folly?
The burden of fulfilling the court’s order will fall largely on Google, which is by far the dominant search engine in Europe.
The decision stunned Google and just about everyone else. Google said it would need time to study the decision, which is a final judgment and cannot be appealed.
The case before the court involved a Spanish lawyer who tried to get Google to remove links to online newspaper accounts from the 1990s of his debt and tax troubles.
The court ruled that companies like Google could be “obliged to re- move links to Web pages” unless there are “particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life,” not to take out those links, according to a summary of the judgment.
The ruling would not necessarily require that the original publisher of the information delete it from its own website — arguing that individual websites are harder for users to find than information gathered through the data-sweeping capabilities of a search engine like Google’s.
Al Verney, a spokesman for Google, said in a statement that the decision was “a disappointing ruling for search engines and online publishers in general,” and that the company would “take time” to analyze the implications.
Some Internet experts said the court had devised an unwieldy and expensive formula for search engines like Google that could lead to less information being searchable online.
“Having search engines conduct a public interest test is problematic, not least because they will be challenged to carry out the kind of thorough assessments that can be done by courts and other public authorities,” said Orla Lynskey, a lecturer in law at the London School of Economics. “I expect the default action by search engines will be to take down information in response to complaints.”
A trade group for information technology companies said the court’s decision posed a threat to free expression in Europe.
“This ruling opens the door to large-scale private censorship in Europe,” said JamesWaterworth, the head of the Brussels office for the Computer and Communications Industry Association, which has Facebook, Microsoft and Google among its members, as well as European companies like BT and T-Mobile.