Court Rules Google's Search Results Qualify As Free Speech

wabrandsma writes with this news from Ars Technica: The regulation of Google's search results has come up from time to time over the past decade, and although the idea has gained some traction in Europe (most recently with "right to be forgotten" laws), courts and regulatory bodies in the U.S. have generally agreed that Google's search results are considered free speech. That consensus was upheld last Thursday, when a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Google's right to order its search results as it sees fit.

Comments

Re:I am sure there will be a challenge

[dywolf]

No I dont remember what happened to Rick Santorum.
Elighten me.

The only thing I can remember about Rick Santorum is how he repeatedly makes a fool of himself, by saying things like "President Obama wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob."

Or how he was pro choice until he ran for Congress....
Or compared the ACA to apartheid....
Or how he to believes global arming is a hoax and junk science....in his so very expert scientific opinion....
Or how its also his, very expert, opinion that is tons of tons of coal and oil left, more than enough for centuries of use....
Or how he though they were just killin old folks in the Netherlands...
Or how he proposed that the National Weather Service not be allowed to release weather data to the public for free...even though we already paid for it via taxes and it's their job, cause it might compete with for profit companies who sell weather data...
Or how wants to change the American Legal system so it aligns with the Bible...while at the same time opposing the idea of Sharia Law, and somehow maintaining that his goal is totally different...
Or how he stated that the Right to Privacy doesn't exist in the Constitution, which was how he defending the banning of homosexuality under sodomy laws (you know, "what happens in private between consenting adults is no one's business"....well Santorum thought it was his business)...

Guess I remember more than I thought.

Re:I am sure there will be a challenge

[Marginal Coward]

Another way to put this (as I understand it - IANAL) is that the corporation shields individuals from civil liability (getting sued) but not from criminal liability (going to jail).

Re:Nothing to do with freedom of speech of 1st ame

[Jason Levine]

I think the quote from UCLA law professor Eugene Volok in the article stated it best:

”Newspapers, guidebooks—and, for that matter, Ars Technica—have a First Amendment right to choose which stories are worth publishing, and which businesses are worth covering,” Volokh wrote to Ars in an e-mail. “Likewise, Google (a modern heir of the guidebook) can choose which pages to prominently display (and thus implicitly recommend as relevant and interesting) to readers and which pages aren’t worth displaying so prominently—or aren’t worth displaying at all.”

Think of Google as a massive guidebook. You ask it for information on X and it returns a list of results that it thinks (based on the algorithms) best match X. If someone made a list of "Top 10 Restaurants in New York City" and a restaurant owner was upset that his restaurant didn't make the list, would he be able to sue to get his included as the #1 restaurant in NYC? Of course not. The list publisher has the right to determine who they think are the top 10 restaurants. Likewise, Google has the right to determine who they think are the top matches for any given search.