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UK MPs Threaten New Laws If Google Won't Censor Search
It's not just Japan that wants to regulate how Google displays search results: judgecorp writes "A committee of British MPs and peers has asked Google to censor search results to protect privacy and threatened to put forward new laws that would force it to do so, if Google fails to comply. The case relates to events such as former Formula One boss Max Mosley's legal bid to prevent Google linking to illegally obtained images of himself."
It's that Max Mosley doesn't want people to know that in private he enjoys orgies while dressed as a Nazi.
That's true, but there's also another bit:
In the UK, the courts have far, far more power than courts in the US. Stuff like super-injunctions ("you are not allowed to tell a member of parliament about this injunction") or ASBOs ("judges can now basically make up laws and apply them to a case") would never fly in the US - the legislature and executive branches would knock them down faster than you can say "constitutional crisis".
Basically, in the US system of checks and balances, the judiciary has no way to go on the offensive. They can block laws and actions, after they've already been passed, but that's about it. In the UK, the courts can actually be proactive instead of just reacting to what the rest of the "government" (US-sense) does.
There's probably a historic reason for the difference, but I'm not enough of a historian to know exactly what it is.