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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.
Why should Google have to censor its search results? All Google is doing is indexing and displaying stuff that's already on the internet. It should be the people who posted it that have to take it down, not Google. Trying to censor Google, for whatever reason, completely undermines one of the things that makes the internet as brilliant as it is.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Max Mosley is an idiot; all he's doing with his legal action is drawing *more* attention to his Nazi-themed orgies and ensuring that, even if he's successful, instead of people finding stories and images about said orgies when they search for him, they'll find stories and images about him trying to censor the stories and images about said orgies.
It's hard to claim it's a privacy issue when it's already in the public domain.
"If Google capitulates to people who want their search results censored"
I think you meant:
If Google capitulates to people who want MY search results censored
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Cases like this show an understandable lack of understanding about how this technology works.
As others have pointed out, going after an indexing service is pointless; however, I find it understandable. Google is the first point of contact to this content for millions of internet users. So, looking from the outside, I can understand how someone would confuse that with providing access to the content.
I hope that Google's laywers are able to make courts in the UK and Japan understand their role in the internet ecosystem.
These laws sound like the worst thing ever until someone posts your credit record online, a nude picture of your daughter, or your copyrighted code that you worked on for ten years and hoped to sell to finance your retirement.
Then, suddenly, they sound great.
The UK has a point about protecting privacy. If any point of failure can overcome the Streisand effect, it's the search engines. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
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.