With Showdown Coming, Will US government Finally Defend Google?
The European Union and US firms such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are moving inexorably toward a showdown on Europe’s attempt to foist upon the entire world its parochial view of the “right to be forgotten.” Specifically, led by French regulators as surrogates for other European institutions, Europe is demanding that Google and other non-EU search engines delete links to challenged information not only from European Union websites but also from all domains worldwide. To date, the Obama administration has been AWOL in defense of both US companies and the principle of the free flow of accurate, public data throughout the worldwide internet.
To review the details, in 2014, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that upon demand by a EU citizen, Google must remove information that is allegedly out of date, irrelevant, or inflammatory (Google is the principle object of the ruling as it accounts for more than 90 percent of the European search market). In response, and under protest, Google began removing links from search results not only from the Google Search domain in the country from which the request came, but also from results in all EU search domains. At this point, the company has evaluated some 1.5 million URLs from 431,000 requests and has removed 43 percent of the requested URLs from its search platform.
Then, in September 2015, the French data protection regulator upped the ante by demanding that offending links be removed from all search results worldwide. Henceforth, links deleted from EU search results would also be deleted from search results in the US, India, or Brazil, for example. Google refused to comply with the initial French mandate. It argued that to do so would result in a “global race to the bottom” for information censorship and that “no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access.”
Google’s defiance produced a fine from the French regulator of about $112,000. In the latest development, Google has appealed the initial French decisions to France’s highest administrative court, the Council of State. In an open letter to the French newspaper Le Monde, Google queried: “If French law applies globally, how long will it be until other countries — perhaps less open and democratic — start demanding that their laws regarding information likewise have global reach?”
It is time for the US government to intervene in this process. In a report to be issued next week — “An American Strategy for Cyberspace: Advancing Freedom, Security, and Prosperity” — scholars at the American Enterprise Institute strongly recommend that the “right to be forgotten” issues be placed on the negotiating agenda of the US-EU Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations.
Whatever course the Obama administration takes, it should be underscored that the issues and policy implications extend far beyond the outcome for Google. At stake is the future of free data flows and accessibility for accurate, public information. Should the French/EU doctrines prevail, the global internet will almost certainly become highly fragmented and subject to the narrow, self-serving parochial demands and censorship.
