Does anyone know if she had taken any legal action against Ripoff Report first? It seems odd to take action against a search engine instead of the company that was actually hosting the defamatory language.
The biggest issue is that Google associates her name with an attribute nationwide (or even worldwide), because of their gigantic market share, and their status as "the front page of the Internet". While one could quantify how many people found her through the Ripoff Report, it's nearly immeasurable how much damage to her reputation may have been done by Google.
It's worth considering that Right To Be Forgotten laws are specifically designed to cover these sorts of cases, like defamation, and Google upholding such a policy, even voluntarily in countries which haven't passed such laws, would probably save them money by absolving them of a lot of liability. (Surely, in an RTBF-covered country, a defamation suit against Google would go nowhere if the plaintiff hadn't filed a RTBF request.)
Namely that a senior Google employee recognized Ripoff Report's business model as suspect, and Ripoff Report's ads had already been suspended by Google's ad products for unsavory business practices, yet Google had still refused to remove the defamation against her.
So doesn't this just validate the Ripoff Report in the first place? She just used the .au court system to censor both Ripoff Report and Google, instead of, you know, suing whoever posted the post on Ripoff Report (which, last time I noticed, was a US website to begin with).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 16.1 ms ] threadIt's worth considering that Right To Be Forgotten laws are specifically designed to cover these sorts of cases, like defamation, and Google upholding such a policy, even voluntarily in countries which haven't passed such laws, would probably save them money by absolving them of a lot of liability. (Surely, in an RTBF-covered country, a defamation suit against Google would go nowhere if the plaintiff hadn't filed a RTBF request.)
EDIT:
Also, in further investigation, Janice Duffy goes into detail on why she feels Google is specifically culpable here: http://www.authorizedstatement.org/statements/authorized-sta....
Namely that a senior Google employee recognized Ripoff Report's business model as suspect, and Ripoff Report's ads had already been suspended by Google's ad products for unsavory business practices, yet Google had still refused to remove the defamation against her.