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EU Court to Rule On 'Right to Be Forgotten' Outside Europe (wsj.com)
The European Union's top court is set to decide whether the bloc's "right to be forgotten" policy stretches beyond Europe's borders, a test of how far national laws can -- or should -- stretch when regulating cyberspace. From a report: The case stems from France, where the highest administrative court on Wednesday asked the EU's Court of Justice to weigh in on a dispute between Alphabet's Google and France's privacy regulator over how broadly to apply the right (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source), which allows EU residents to ask search engines to remove some links from searches for their own names. At issue: Can France force Google to apply it not just to searches in Europe, but anywhere in the world? The case will set a precedent for how far EU regulators can go in enforcing the bloc's strict new privacy law. It will also help define Europe's position on clashes between governments over how to regulate everything that happens on the internet -- from political debate to online commerce. France's regulator says enforcement of some fundamental rights -- like personal privacy -- is too easily circumvented on the borderless internet, and so must be implemented everywhere. Google argues that allowing any one country to apply its rules globally risks upsetting international law and, when it comes to content, creates a global censorship race among autocrats.
How can the EU court rule on anything outside of Europe?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If this goes through, it'll be a precedent for everybody.
Yes and No.
If Saudi Arabia demands all pictures of the prophet Mohammed be taken off all google image searches- google will just not operate in Saudi Arabia. It's not a big enough market for google to worry about making the rest of the world angry- and they would have to respect Singapore saying no images of the royal family- and Bahrain saying don't insult the sheik... and... the internet becomes a censored mess.
If the republic of Ireland demands google show all search pages in Gaelic all around the world... again, I can't see google complying- they'll just step out of Ireland.
If the United States or the EU ask google to stop tracking certain things or remove some insignificant data they have... google may want to do as they say because those blocks as a whole make up a large amount of income.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
From my experience with French and Russian image websites, they have no problem accepting DMCA complaints in English and replying back in English for emails. Submitting complaints in English won't be a problem. However, they might expect a faster response as they got back to me within 45 minutes to 48 hours..
The whole right to be forgotten thing is asinine to begin with.
It doesn't remove any of the source information - it just makes it harder to find - and makes the net less useful.
If you access a different TLD, then you are connecting to servers in a different country, therefore the location IS very different.
However, they might expect a faster response as they got back to me within 45 minutes to 48 hours..
You do you mean "they might expect a faster response"?
If you complain to them, they are the ones responding to you. They don't expect any response.
What are trying to say? I am puzzled by your sentences.
Thanks in advance!
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
they'll just step out of Ireland
Not with Ireland's tax laws they won't.
There is no such thing as a precedent across different countries.
wait, you are sending DMCA (a US law) complains to French and Russian web sites?
wait, you are sending DMCA (a US law) complains to French and Russian web sites?
Yes, they accept the DMCA takedown notice at face value with no questions asked. Some of the Russian contact forms have a pull-down menu option that says, "DMCA Complaint".
US has a handful of cases looking to do the same thing
A handful? The US is world champion in extending judgements beyond its jurisdiction. They invented the practice.
" it is mostly criminals, perverts and politicians who need it."
But why shouldn't criminals get it? I mean, once they've served out their sentence and are trying to get on with their lives?
Having this stuff in their record ... its never going to completely go away and it shouldn't go away.
But as a society don't we want to enable someone trying to go straight to actually succeed? How is labelling them a criminal and having their past 1 click away for the rest of their lives going to facilitate that?
"how many left wing people would like someone like Donald Trump to be able to purge his less honorable history from the Internet. Remember the settlements that his father made for not renting to black people. That would be gone. While he was elected through the electoral college, it was appropriate for the populace to know his past. The same with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The politicians want to hide their dirty past."
That's not quite how it works. It's not "gone" its just not 1-click away. Its not going to come up on google results when you type Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump; but someone doing any sort of actual investigative journalism would still be able to dig it up with some effort. And once its dug up, and reported on, it would be "current news about a current politician" -- and that isn't eligible to be de-indexed because its highly relevant political discourse.
Will the right to be forgotten include the ability to erase other people's literal memories of whatever it was that you did?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The right to be forgotten violates my cultural beliefs.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Need I remind you that there's currently a German citizen, in New Zealand, without any ties to the US, having his assets frozen on behalf of a charge and conviction in absentia of a US court?
Cry me a river about other countries overstepping their jurisdiction.
What is this "right to be forgotten"? I don't think, it exists — or ever existed — nor should exists. My memories, what I have seen, heard, and otherwise experienced are mine, however and wherever I recorded it.
Suppose, technology allowed (wait, it already does!) to carefully erase human memories — would it suddenly become your right to demand, for example, your ex submits to wiping out his memories of your time together?
Would it be Ok for employers to wipe out the memories employees may have associated with the employment upon its termination?
There is no such "right", we all better stop pretending it exists.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
How is it going to be enforced? Court ruling is useless wihout instruments to make it work.
I can only see things going one way: ultimately, it's just the same as China's governmental firewall and other countries that demands companies to have special filters and special rules put in place to operate inside the country. And that only affects Internet access inside the country, it cannot and will not be enforced anywhere else by some sheer will and bravado.
If the data that is supposed to be erased is lying outside France or the EU, they won't be able to do anything without international agreements and a huge ammount of diplomacy.
This is actually worse than what China demands.
And if neither the company nor the country's government it's located at decides to comply, then it goes towards sanctions and whatnot...
which is something I highly doubt any country government would be willing to do for something as controversial as rights of people to demand that content about themselves be erased from servers, or access to it be unlisted from search engines.
And don't get me wrong, I'm all for a privacy pushback, and privacy protection, but this isn't how it's gonna happen. This is bravado. Politicians and judges all around the world are behaving like spoiled brats these days, and it's starting to look really bad.
Just think about it. France is telling us to go after Google because it didn't erase information that our citizens requested from servers located in our country. Fuck that shit. What government is going to comply with something like that without asking something in return? Forget US that obviously has a ton of lobbyists there to dissuade politicians from taking any action, imagine other countries that are far more corrupt, that have more important priorities, and/or don't give a shit about what France or EU wants.
It's quickly becoming too apparent how much inside a magical bubble some politicians and judges seem to live in. Time to wake up, stop wasting time, and put up laws and rulings that have real effects, not just this stream of bullshit that is never going to catch.
If you access a different TLD, then you are connecting to servers in a different country
The TLD of the domain generally has nothing to do with the location of the servers. Some countries even make a tidy profit letting foreign sites use their TLDs when they happen to be common suffixes. Examples: goo.gl (Greenland), itun.es (Spain), spoti.fi (Finland), buy.me (Montenegro). The servers for those TLDs, and their intended audiences, can be located almost anywhere in the world.
When the intention of registering a *.uk domain is to cater to users in the UK, it makes sense to host the servers there as well for better performance—but this is by no means mandatory.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
But you do know that the TLDs have nothing to so with the location of the server? .com domain for a decade in Germany, and that is actually nearly ten years ago that I canceled that domain.
I hosted a
The TLD thing is no argument anyway.
We are tlsking about EU citizens. They have 'the right to be forgotten'. Can't be so hard to implement it world wide instead of trying to decide by domain or location if you show the 'inapropriated data' or not.
I actually don't get what the fuss is about this. I you want to life in a law less zone that is fine for you. We prefer to have some privacy, and it is a shame that companies are to dumb to use common sense and force such laws to be crafted.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Google Should call their bluff on this.
Create a new company, give class A (voting) ownership shares to current stockholders which breaks all financial links with Google.
Give/sell (with a loan) the new company the sole right to sell advertising in Europe, with the cost that they must remit X% of the sales revenue to Google for this exclusive right. This would include a contract clause that Google can terminate the relationship at any time (in the event the independent company does something Google doesn't like).
End all Google parent company operation in Europe.
Any future business in the EU should be setup the same way, no direct control by Google licensed out to Google created independent entities. Google's profits are no longer profits, the payments could be structured as loan payments or dividends to reduce the taxes.
The Courts couldn't fine these new companies because they are independent business unconnected to Google and the independent company would have no access to change Google listings.
Honestly I've always wondered why they didn't do this from the start for all their advertising sales as it would insulate the main company from attacks on the revenue stream. And in the end Google USA would be immune from attacks by foreign court systems looking to pollute it's listings. In one simple stroke the power of the EU to regulate Google listings goes up in smoke.
Everytime these over-reaching verdicts come up, I refer to the Bokki-Wokki Supreme Court ruling, whereas in compliance with Bokki-Wokki accessability and inclusion laws, every world-wide web page reachable from Bokki-Wokki needs to be presented in the Wokki language. Starting January 1st of 2015, non-compliance carries a B 10,000 penalty (USD 25,000) per day, up to a maximum of 999 trillion Bok.
Ridiculous? Of course. But so is European courts deciding what a Canadian website operator using Canadian infrastructure can do. Or vice-versa... oh wait.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Hello to people googling creamer's name! Welcome to the clown show.
Or check out my GitHub page for a forthcoming YouTube video on how to takedown dick pics from Russian image websites.
https://github.com/cdreimer/how_to_takedown_dick_pics_from_russian_image_websites
The admin for PicUA just sent me an email that those links are now broken. Please verify. ;)
Seriously?
Ok then, I'll take your words for granted.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Wow, so all this effort to get rid of the dick pics... only to announce to the whole world that people made dick pics about you.
I've often confounded my critics by taking their negative against me to transform it into a positive that I can use.
You're either denser than neutronium or a sublime genius.
There are many YouTube videos for taking a dick pic but none for taking down a dick pic. Given the Russian angle in today's politics, a takedown dick pic video might go viral.
Seriously?
I occasionally get replies in English that the dick pics have been removed.
Ok then, I'll take your words for granted.
You don't have to take my word. You can always copy and paste the links into a browser to find out if the dick pic is still up. I'm sure that this set of links doesn't go back to a website with the WannaCry virus.
You don't have to take my word. You can always copy and paste the links into a browser to find out if the dick pic is still up. I'm sure that this set of links doesn't go back to a website with the WannaCry virus.
I have come to believe that you were handling alike situations.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The TLD of the domain generally has nothing to do with the location of the servers.
In fact... this is incorrect. Usually they are directly related. Usually companies place the servers that will ultimately
handle the HTTP request for a given TLD within or near to the geographic area of that TLDS' users.
Yes, some TLDs are (mis)used in different ways, and some smaller companies put all their servers in one country, and still serve
out multiple TLD versions of their website from the same datacenter.
However, for global companies such as Google, they will have datacenters in numerous countries, and the corresponding DNS name TLD
is routed towards the datacenter appropriate for that localization of their website.
In Google's case, when you visit their website, they redirect you to the proper TLD, and they have their systems of answering IP addresses and DNS queries differently (Anycast-based service routing) depending on which country you are located in when you navigate to your local country's version of Google; so the TLD used indicates which country/region's localization of Google you are using.
I actually don't get what the fuss is about this. I you want to life in a law less zone that is fine for you.
Just because you live in a zone with fascist anti-Speech laws for protecting a right to be "forgotten" and erase what was publicized about you don't mean the rest of the world does.
Your country might grant you the right to be forgotten by restraining companies' free speech, but your country don't have a right
to restrict what gets stored on and served out to the world by by servers outside your country.
Usually companies place the servers that will ultimately handle the HTTP request for a given TLD within or near to the geographic area of that TLDS' users.
Near the users, yes, for performance reasons. However, while it may be common practice for companies catering to users in a particular country to register a site with the corresponding ccTLD, this is not something you can take for granted in the general case. Apart from certain unusually restrictive ccTLDs, the servers (and users) for any domain may be located anywhere in the world. A ccTLD suffix is at best a hint about the intended audience, subject to many exceptions.
Perhaps "nothing to do with" was a bit strong—there is a certain degree of correlation—but it is not the case that a server's location can be confidently determined by the TLD of the domain(s) that it serves.
However, for global companies such as Google...
Google, the owner of goo.gl? A domain name with a Greenland TLD serving as a URL shortener for primarily non-Greenland visitors?
More to the point, as Luthair said earlier, while the TLD might suggest the site's intended audience, and perhaps even hint at the location of the server, it doesn't necessarily match the visitor's location. Someone from the EU can easily access the US/international version of Google through google.com/ncr ("no country redirect"), to say nothing of proxies and VPNs. If the EU wants to censor content coming from non-EU-hosted sites, it needs to filter the traffic itself at the EU border, at its own expense. Note that I am not saying that this is a good idea; not trying to censor the Internet would of course be preferable. The only other way this can logically end, though, is with every web site restricted to the least common denominator of allowable material among all Internet-connected countries, at which point we might as well just shut down the Internet for lack of content.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
So in your world: companie > humans.
Company 'rights' > human rights.
You are an idiot.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As others pointed out, that isn't necessarily true - it also isn't important, the company is still doing business in the country. Consider a call centre, if you get an offshore rep can they do things that would be illegal under your countries laws?