If you have offices in Europe it is. They can always fine you it is too expensive to comply, or until you close your offices and end your corporate entity there.
This is why I don't understand why people think these countries are overstepping. It's not like they're forcing total outsiders to do their bidding. Google set up offices all over the place, and, surprise! Now they're beholden to the local authorities.
If you only want to be subject to the authority of one jurisdiction, make sure your company doesn't have a presence anywhere else. That's not a guarantee, but it helps a lot.
Google doesn't have a problem being subject to multiple jurisdictions, just as an American company it reasonably doesn't want to apply French law outside France's jurisdiction.
And France reasonably wants French law to apply to a company with French presence.
One can debate the merits of the law all day long, but in the end all that matters is that a national government is sovereign within their own territory. If they want you to do something that you don't want to do, you can remove yourself from their jurisdiction, change their mind somehow, or do it anyway.
Pretty sure whack a mole works at the corporate level as well. If anyone is in position to form a specific subsidiary for each employee, service, and computer it's google. I'm sure everyone would hate such a bureaucratic nightmare, but if governments want Kafkaesque structure, well, they'll eventually get it.
Even with super helpful full disclosure, it could take years just to find the legal entity they're interested in fining.
But nobody wants that. it's stupid.
I kinda sorta see the point about people in .fr can see stuff via .com that the government doesn't want them to see, but it sure seems like trying to legislate no rain on saturday.
Be serious. Google isn't going to pervert a host countries laws especially not France which is one of the gatekeepers of the EU. Plus France would know lots of subsidiaries were being created and just implement additional safeguards.
Google is not the Internet. They are a multinational company who store search results in a series of databases created and managed by people. Those results can be changed if Google wants to do business in France and quite likely the EU if it all starts to escalate.
And I'll let you in on a secret. European startups would be more than happy to build the next Google.
There's nothing preventing them from starting the next Google, except the insane amount of difficulties in doing so. That said, Russia and China have been able to do so quite well.
That's a per-country situation. Copyright is not universal, and even age of consent is per country. Various countries like Indonesia ban all porn, some countries outlaw animal porn, other's allow it. Etc.
And the US opinion on these things is applied worldwide. People are arrested in New Zealand and Germany even though they didn’t break local laws by hosting pirated content.
If the US can enforce their laws on the web, why should France, China, etc not be able to do so, too?
It's not opinion. They've entered mutually agreed upon trade/copyright agreements explicitly. Similarly New Zealand or Germany can enforce its copyrights in the US.
Yes, it is an opinion. There are laws that are above those agreements, and they are continously broken by the US. Again, and again, and again.
We have to be on a web where stuff like nude boobs is considered NSFW, where sites that allow users to sell used digital goods are instantly sued to death, etc.
These things are all based on a US-centric moral framework.
The whole web is full of that. And Google, a company that, until recently, was legally headquartered in Ireland, applies only the US moral standard for their products.
Even if I am in europe, I can’t upload a movie to YouTube that is allowed to be shown on TV in Germany during daytime just because the US moral standard says nude boobs are not okay.
If the US and its companies want to force their moral and legal standards upon us, we will force our standards upon them, too.
Which is one of the reasons why TTIP contains the "local IP" part: Only sparkling wine made in France may be called Champagner from then on, only Parmesan made in Italy may be called this, etc.
> If the US and its companies want to force their moral and legal standards upon us, we will force our standards upon them, too.
This is incredibly silly reasoning. Google enforces the standards it chooses (generally American standards, in this case, as it is an American company) on its own properties. That's quite a far cry from imposing your own set of values on a third-party service provider.
The equivalent would be to start your own service which imposes your own set of standards (which, I'll point out, exists in the form of DailyMotion and LiveLeak, among others), not to say "well if you get to apply your standards to your service then I get to apply my standards to your service."
If a German company operates within Germany with German customers completely legal according to German law, and then gets fucked over by US institutions forcing US banks to seize the money of that company just because the actions (which happened solely under German law) were not according to US law...
Then it is the exact same situation. If the US can dictate our companies laws, we can dictate their companies laws, too.
The Euro was made also to reduce the influence of the dollar for international trade, and especially the countries within the EU have almost no contact with the dollar anymore, nor do most companies here. Which makes sure the US can’t just seize their assets (like they used to seize assets of companies because "if they trade in dollar, they operate under US law")
Except it's all based on trade agreements and negotiations. The US didn't agree to German drafted laws so they don't apply - if Germany didn't want them then they shouldn't have signed them.
If the argument is that the German population doesn't want them, then that's an internal issue and not the US' problem, as we negotiate with state actors, not citizens.
No, that's not the case: The trade agreements have a very limited scope, and the US oversteps those boundaries consistently. Our government in Germany ends up sending not even a strongly worded letter to the US because they don't want to risk the international relationship, but the official position is that these actions are illegal.
It's just like the NSA affair. And the fact that in the Microsoft case a US judge stated that, even though the servers in question were in Europe, the US could seize them because the internet was a US invention and the company had made business in the US just shows the issue: the US legal enforcement consistently oversteps nations boundaries.
Really, boobs on YouTube is your example of American hegemony? You know that there are other sites, some even based in America, where you can upload your boobs?
A documentary that shows nude boobs can’t be uploaded by our state television to YouTube because Google forbids that.
Such a documentary DEFINITELY doesn’t belong on LiveLeak or PornHub or whatever either, though. It belongs on a platform like Vimeo or YouTube, where it’s forbidden due to US-American moral standards.
>A documentary that shows nude boobs can’t be uploaded by our state television to YouTube because Google forbids that.
So upload it somewhere else. Google is a private company and as such is perfectly within its rights to allow or not allow activity based on arbitrary rules.
Per country, but the way the laws work (from my non-lawyer understanding) would mean that any company with an office in one country would have to censor those results for other countries as well. If Google was hosting/indexing/etc. certain illegal material in a country where it was illegal, it could still be in major trouble in the US and many countries in Europe.
Unlike China, France has a democratically elected government. If the french do not like the censorship actions that their government requires of google, they are free to elect an alternative administration.
It is disingenuous to assume that all societies have the same ultra-liberal, privacy-be-damned, perspective, as appears to be prevalent in the anglo-saxon world, and it is healthy that some democratically elected governments should question Google's hegemony. It certainly doesn't appear to be the case that America's federal administration has anything but sycophantic praise for everything that Silicon Valley does.
French voters are free to censor their own internet. They aren't free to censor the internet globally.
France is free to set up their own version of the Great Firewall of China if they want to block Google.com within their borders. That's their recourse; demanding Google censor search results everywhere is not.
Yet America demands the right a) to tax its citizens globally b) to force other countries to enforce its sanctions under risk of freezing their banks' payment systems (BNP Paribas / Russian banks), c) Hollywood inspired copyright law must be imposed on the rest of the planet (Hollywood is "free" not to sell its wares to the globe, if it doesn't like the piracy risk), d) free-market "democracy" must be imposed on unready countries lest 500 000 troops land on your doorstep, ready to wreak decades of collateral havoc (see Iraq/ISIS).
France is making a point that there is a legitimate argument to be discussed about things that happen in France not be pushed out to the rest of the planet. They may be wrong, but the debate is worth having. If Google doesn't like it, it is free to quit France, and the french will be free to punish their government for it.
I concur - this is an act of corporate imperialism on the part of Google, and it should be no surprise that - as an American company - it flaunts its ability to ignore the will of sovereign entities freely. Troubling times indeed .. I hope this will be reversed in the near future, because I think the right to be forgotten is a very human right, and should not be impinged upon by those who have nearly no other purpose than the rampant commercialization of citizens as consumers. My citizenship is more important than my function as a consumer. Google need to be taught some respect for this fact, alas ..
All I see is France trampling over other countries sovereignty. Free speech is a protected right in the US, but France is trying to exert French law over American citizens (I'm using the US as an example).
It's silly argument: if you do this for all countries, you'll be left with a tiny intersection of only the content that is not illegal in some form somewhere on earth.
I can see it as France trampling over other countries sovereignty, but I can also see it as France protecting its sovereign citizens, which is .. after all .. the Purpose of Sovereignty in the first place. So I'm not swayed by your corporatist argument that we should just negate the rights of citizenry for the sake of a clearly non-Sovereign, corporate entity - which has demonstrably profited from the mass-harvesting of social information at the personal layer.
It is indeed a gray area, but what did you expect between the extreme black and white of individual freedom and corporate control/hegemony? Some sort of simple 'bit flip'?
Alas, precisely because the bits are so easily flipped, this discussion must be continued - and it must not be being conducted, so, reactively.
I am an advocate for the right to disappear. I happen to think, having witnessed the bit flip in the positive direction - i.e. mass-surveillance as a consumer - I also wish to remind my peers that it must be recognized that it can .. also .. just as easily be turned off.
In other words, French mores on the issue should infect American mores. It would be good for other cultures, other mores, to not let it go the other way: Total Surveillance as a normative.
In this sense, perhaps yet again, the French lead the way.
Important detail: not once in my comment did I mention or hint at a corporate entity. I was merely commenting on a nation-to-nation level.
You seem to be fine with French law applying to American nationals - what do you think of sharia law applying to French nationals? How about the law-of-the-week declared by some upstart banana republic dictator? Who gets to pull the lever on global law? Where do you, fit2rule, draw the line - is it only France? Only countries where Google has operates? only western democracies? Or does every sovereign get to throw what they deem illegal into the pot?
Google do business in France, and are thus subject to French laws when doing so - especially with regard to how it interacts with French citizens. Do you not think that as a state, France has some jurisdiction over how this occurs?
And yes, I deem sovereign power more important than corporate power. Don't you?
French laws being applied in France ate fine and dandy. French laws applied worldwide? I'm with "corporate power" on that one. Someone needs to tell France to keep it's laws to itself. That is the essence of sovereignty
Apples and oranges not only between the situation, but each point you listed.
America can do whatever it wants tax-wise to its own citizens. Copyright and bank integration has to do with existing trade agreements that are peer-shared and mutually respected. Russia is free to keep its assets within its own country if it doesn't want to participate in a larger system with shared rules.
The issue here is that France is trying to apply a local law that is not mutually agreed upon with any other country, to other countries. And in doing so is creating bad precedent regarding censorship extended across borders with no recourse. I can't challenge France's law in court as a US citizen, so why should I be denied access to information at their discretion?
Your perspective is too narrow. The wider point is that not everyone agrees with America, yet by virtue of the dollar's dominance, and America's military dominance, America can force anyone to accept its point of view. Clearly no country can survive without access to the dollar-based global payments system. To pretend that Russia can merrily go on without access to it is to sit behind a convenient lie.
That is what is happening in all of my points, including (the relatively minor) point a). Recall that it is not obvious that revenue earned in a country that is not America should be taxed by America.
More generally, someone democratic needs to challenge America once in a while, arguably for America's own health.
So they point out what is wrong with your example, and you make even vaguer arguments in favor of it?
Here, your argument is even weaker because it is essentially "we give america power, and they use it".
The dollar's dominance is not america's fault, it's literally everyone else's :)
America has not militarily imposed it's will on france or any other european nation that i'm aware of in the recent past so i'm not sure you can really claim america forcing y'all to their point of view on that one.
If you think for a second that any country that has power will not use it against other countries in trade negotiations, that just seems ultra-naive to me.
"Recall that it is not obvious that revenue earned in a country that is not America should be taxed by America."
Hey, remember that time when france tried to tax all the Google revenue not earned in france by claiming google ireland has a permanent establishment in france (and then claims google owes it a billion in tax when the max google possibly earned was a total of 237 million in google france?)?
No worries though, i'm sure, unlike every other country, france wouldn't try to use it's power to force any other country or multi-national corporation to do anything.
They'll only do the right thing.
France would almost certainly do exactly the same, as indeed it did once upon a time when it was briefly dominant in Europe (late 17th/18th centuries). Yet it would have been correct to speak truth to might then, just as it is now.
Past that, can you point to a time in history when a utopic state of happiness and rightness ruled (IE you got what you wanted) and the world still functioned?
Your argument is too broad for the issue under discussion. What you say may be true, but the fact remains that (regardless of the underlying reason) these other countries agreed to the terms set by the US with respect to copyright, and agreed to enforce the sanctions.
The argument that France appears to be making in this case is that it doesn't need other countries to agree to its demands, its courts have jurisdiction everywhere.
I feel the difference is straightforward. The US has an interest in its world view and values being shared by the rest of the world and uses its economic power to get other countries to agree, at least in part, to enforcing that world view and values. They are not however (in general), asserting that decisions made in the US apply in other countries (except to our own citizens, wherein enforcement of the local US law is still at the discretion of the foreign nations while our citizens are within their borders).
If the US were to assert global jurisdiction for a decision made in a local (i.e., state or federal) court it would be equally unfounded. If, however, they were to negotiate with another country and use our economic advantage to get them to agree to enforcement of a particular policy, then the country has presumably weighed the pros and cons of that decision and decided it was worth the compromise. You don't have to like it, but if you skip the middle step sovereignty as a nation becomes meaningless.
> What you say may be true, but the fact remains that (regardless of the underlying reason) these other countries agreed to the terms set by the US with respect to copyright, and agreed to enforce the sanctions.
Just like people agree to pay the mob protection money.
I mean, countries could refuse to go along with things like FATCA. It would be an enconomic disaster for them when the US freezes them out, but they could do it.
Two wrongs don't make a right. France is at fault and so is the US in many of the examples you cited here, so why do you keep defending the indefensible and morally questionable policies of the French state?
The US is a bully that enforces its will worldwide via military and economic might. I don't hate the US, but I consider that statement to be fact at this point. They have an absurd tax system and use threats to get other governments to agree to enforce it.
A is an example of "you can do what you want to *your own citizens when it doesn't affect the sovereign rights of other countries", so it's not applicable (IE if the US started taxing french citizens, you'd have a point)
b and c are examples of mutually-agreed treaties/agreements. If france didn't want to do it, it shouldnt' have signed the treaties :)
d was a mostly-coalition force AFAIK (not my area of expertise), but let me just suggest that rules of starting/fighting wars is not quite the same as the right to be forgotten, and that this doesn't belong as an example because basically every country can be accused of starting wars to impose it's will unilaterally somewhere else. That's what war is :)
I rest my case. You're basically saying "we're strong so we'll do what we want, thanks, and you'd do the same". Fair enough, and you are right, that is the way of history. But it is also the way that empires fall. ":)"
You might be unaware of this, but FATCA does not only apply to US citizens, but to "U.S. persons for tax purposes". Me, being a German citizen, have to abide FATCA simply because I have income taxable in the US.
The limitations are severe: Since living in the US I am not allowed to hold certain financial products that I owned when living in Germany, since compliance with US law would be to costly for German institutions. In particular, citing wikipedia [1], "It requires non-US (foreign) financial institutions, such as banks, to enter into an agreement with the IRS to search through their customer databases to identify those customers suspected of being U.S. persons and to disclose the account holders' names, TINs, addresses, and the transactions of most types of accounts."
Labeling the opposing point to France's very strict defamation rules cannot be termed "ultra-liberal, privacy-be-damned" really. It has been pointed out that this state of affairs has led to many criminal/politically harmful events to be widely known. One of the best known in recent memory was the DSK affair (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/d-s-k-french-lives-f...). Although his rapist past was well-known is some circles through informal gossip, the victims were never able to declare so in public due to threat of these strict laws. More on this sordid affair here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/26/dominique-strauss-k...
Whatever one thinks of DSK, no court, in either the US or France, has found him guilty. Yes he has paid compensation but there is no criminal charge that stuck. I'll further remind you that DSK was arrested, in traditional style (complaint is phoned in, police arrive), well before the internet got involved. Thus the idea that free-speech on the internet helped justice in this case is untrue.
China does have elections and voting on laws. However only a special group is able to participate in those elections. We still do not consider China to be a democracy by any stretch of the imagination. The people who the laws are enforced against weren't able to participate in the election of the representatives who enacted them.
By that same measure it would be undemocratic to enforce French laws on non-French citizens who weren't able to participate in the elections of the representative who enacted them. Whatever chip on your shoulder you have about American companies or the actions of the American government do not change this fact.
Well, not quite. I do agree that RTBF as written is sorely lacking -- but I think the fundamental issue is interesting: Do we have a right to privacy? Do we have a right to our own data, and data about ourselves? Both are as I understand it part of the law both in the EU and in the USA.
The general mold (which AFAIK is quite similar across the EEC area, somewhat independent of the formation of the EEC/EU) -- is that a user has a right to a) make any (personal/sensitive) information stored is correct, and b) as an extension of various common legal principles one have the right to a new life after being acquitted, and after serving out a sentence.
Just those two things imply a need for a global accord on how data should be handled, indexed etc. The current RTBF framework is probably not the best approach -- but I think it misses the mark to simply equate it with censorship. Controlling information is of course technically censorship -- but there's a difference between having a legal recourse against defamation -- and erasing Tiananmen Square from history.
I do think we are right to be worried about the actual results of any legislation though.
If it wasn't so unlikely to actually get anywhere, one might want the UN, or the Haag to set up some form of accord -- as right to privacy, and right to manage information in digital archives (which are much more versatile, accessible, trivial to copy and linkable than traditional paper archives) have some definite overlap with human rights.
This isn't some insurmountable task; there appears to be wide co-operation on other kinds of data, such as child porn already -- even if the age of consent is very different in the (all of?) the US and much of Euorope.
A website that fulfills a search query by searching google.com, then searching google.fr, then searching google.cn. It shows the results to the google.com query but gives badges to results based on which governments appear to be censoring them.
For some reason our computer teacher in elementary school had a strange obsession with this site and we were only allowed to use dogpile instead of any of those sites individually. There might have been another one that was used from time to time called "metacrawler" I think... its been a while.
I almost got in trouble with a friend for using dogpile. A teacher walked passed and immediately assumed that it was obscene (thinking it was referencing a pile of dog poop I guess?). Luckily their was another teacher nearby that knew what it was and gave it the OK.
It seems the judicial system in France could learn something from Colombia:
"Seeking to balance the right to clarify the record and the right to freedom of expression, the [highest Constitutional Court in Colombia] held that the newspaper was not required to remove the article. The court did require the newspaper to update the published information and use “robots.txt” and “metatags” to prevent the indexing of the content by Google due to the particularly serious nature of the crime and the severe personal consequences for Gloria."
There are many more well known nouns called Columbia than just the university, but amusingly the very first sentence on Wikipedia reads "'Columbia' is a frequent misspelling of Colombia, a large country in South America. See also Colombia (disambiguation) for other uses of that spelling."
Never realised this spelling mistake was such a thing but now I notice it all the time!
I've been living in Bogotá for a few months and I only realised I was spelling Colombia wrong a couple of months in - pretty embarrassing.
I now notice many if not most of my English-speaking friends make the same mistake when emailing/facebooking/whatsapping me and I try to correct them as I go.
It appears Columbia is a reflex spelling of the sound of the word - I'm from the UK so haven't had that much exposure to the use of the word for the NY University, so I don't think that's the explanation in my case.
Someone should make a website for this along the lines of amispellingcolumbiacorrectly.com -> NO to spread the word ;-)
A lot of Americans probably are used to spelling it Columbia because there are tons of towns/cities/roads named Columbus or Columbia here. That would unfortunately render your website idea mostly incorrect - for most Americans "Columbia" is the correct spelling of what they are trying to spell. It's really only the country and some towns in Latin America that spell it with an O.
(The reflex spelling probably comes from the fact that most English speakers are primarily familiar with the English spelling of Christopher Columbus)
> That would unfortunately render your website idea mostly incorrect
I meant correct in the context of trying to spell Colombia, the country name, given that's what I was talking about - obviously the spelling Columbia is correct if you're referring to anything else which actually goes by that spelling..
My dad is from Bogotá so I probably notice it more. I do remember one time he was looking for some world cup gear and we went into a sports store and he thought they had misspelled "Colombia" because a hat had "Columbia" written on it.
Nope, Total Recall was based on "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." I wonder what story you are thinking of?
Edit: yes, apparently: "In 1966, the late Philip K. Dick published the novelette "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." A movie based on the story will be released next year; this book is a novelization of the script and the original novel" -- http://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Piers-Anthony/dp/06880520...
Before mounting your US judicial high horse please remember that the US claims universal jurisdiction more than any other country in the world. As a US corporation please keep this in mind before you denigrate this judicial practices of foreign jurisdictions.
Do Google have any presence in France like offices or property which to give the judicial system in France jurisdiction to make this decision over the site?
I think it is crazy that we still cannot define individually how many bytes of data Google may store to profile us.
Note that it should not take many bits to profile us in a way that is useful, while still respecting our privacy. For example, with about 33 bits of information, one can identify any individual on this planet. With less than this amount, one can still put you in a class of individuals, such that you get relevant search results.
GEOip anyone ? Not sure if it's reliable or it's performance impact. In terms of bypassing it: it's either world-wide block outside of your juridiction or tough luck.
Google already uses GeoIP (and IP multicast).
Doesn't matter if you type google.de or google.com in the URL-bar of the browser. You will always get the German version, which differs significantly and is practically worthless for programming or technology topics.
I assume it's the same for google.fr (can't try it for obvious reasons).
What works is google.com/ncr or just use duckduckgo.
Only thing that bother me is that this article revolve solely around google point of view.
The main spirit of the french RTBF law is to protect citizen privacy when published media can have negative effect on their life.
As for an example revenge porn, false public accusation or protection of witness are more in the spectrum of RTBF law than chinese-like censorship mentionned by Google.
And correct me if I'm wrong but french RTBF apply only to individuals, so how could they even compare this with state censorsphip?
Because the precedent is dangerous and is a very slippery slope. RTBF will easily start applying to politicians, from there we'll let's also remove XYZ and soon we're in China.
Well, Google does have programs to take revenge porn out of many search results, and does (unsurprisingly) have programs to rate truth above falsehood: that's part of the search quality about which they're so passionate.
The bit where the state says they'll punish you if you don't comply---if you don't stop talking about the things they want kept quiet? That's state censorship. What else could it be?
I totally understand your point and of course it had to be both in and ideal world. But if the web server is hosted offshore...
But again its strange because Google dont say they won't apply RTBF, they just say they will apply it on a per country basis... But from a technical standpoint this is even more complicated... So they basically say "we Google define the law" for everything that is "out" of your country.
Yet good luck to them defining what "out your country mean" in a global network.
The right to be forgotten is the right to erase history.
EFF is not a fan of right to erase history when they see other mechanisms for solving the same problem.
(IE either we should give up an curtail press freedoms, or we should accept that society needs to be more accepting of reality. This intermediate state where we curtail the freedom of certain actors, but have decided another set get a pass, is what the EFF is complaining about)
Yet the mechanism to "erase history" (in terms of referencing) is in place and Google controls it.
As a citizen I would fell better knowing that a Law define what can and cannot be erase instead of bargaining on the promise of a Big Company : "Don't be evil"
An ideal solution would be that an international treaty globaly redefine for the best all the laws about copyright which are all utterly outdated and inappropriate for digital media.
(RTBF is as far I know is in France either a part or an extension of copyrights laws)
"Yet the mechanism to "erase history" (in terms of referencing) is in place and Google controls it.
"
Because the EU and france forced google to control it. They didn't want to control it at all. They tried desperately not to. They wanted the source of these stories to be responsible for what they publish, and be forced to update or remove the stories.
This make sense. Now I get why EFF support this.
The FUD and comparaison with China still bother me, but in the end they are right cause yeah indexing engine should be agnostic...
But excuse me if I prefer DuckDuckGo over Google on that matter :P
You're saying here that absent external requirements from governments, Google would never make any policy decisions about what was and wasn't revealed in its SERPs? I find that hard to believe. You're making a lot of sense in general and I don't think RTBF is good policy, but you might be overstating your case.
I'm ignorant of the actual law, so this is just a guess. Targeting the companies indexing the information is probably a more tractable problem then tracking down and eliminating all the sources. There's only a handful of really influential companies indexing this data compared to the numbers that produce and distribute it. If you remove the indexes and render the information difficult to find, its not that much different from removing the information altogether.
And my guess is: the local newspapers are a worse political target than evil large western company they can blame all their ills on :)
"Targeting the companies indexing the information is probably a more tractable problem then tracking down and eliminating all the sources."
I don't buy this. All of these sources need a way to print retractions/etc in these countries due to the way libel/etc laws work. So they already must have mechanisms to achieve this.
This is like targeting library card catalogs for indexing microfiche.
> And my guess is: the local newspapers are a worse political target than evil large western company they can blame all their ills on :)
I don't think that's the reason:
> In 1995 the European Union adopted the European Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46EC) to regulate the processing of personal data.[9] This is now considered a component of human rights law.[10] The new European Proposal for General Data Protection Regulation provides protection and exemption for companies listed as “media” companies, like newspapers and other journalistic work. However, Google purposely opted out of being classified as a “media” company and so is not protected. Judges in the European Union ruled that because the international corporation, Google, is a collector and processor of data it should be classified as a “data controller” under the meaning of the EU data protection directive. These “data controllers” are required under EU law to remove data that is “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant, ” - making this directive of global importance
It's like something you would read out of Catch-22.
News organizations can still publish articles about someone who invoked the RTBF, but nobody will read it because it's impossible to find.
In the bureaucratically definitive sense it's technically not censorship, it's just using a characteristic of the internet to make it censorship. At least, that's the writing on the wall.
I view this as a very cynical attempt by Googles' counsel to prevent it from being governed by the laws of France. Associating the "right to be forgotten" with Russias' homophobic laws is clearly an attempt to frame the idea in the negative - when the right to be forgotten is far from the same kind of heinous cultural act as homophobia.
Very, very cynical - and Google have lost yet another point in their race to dominate culture as a corporate, global power..
France's attempt to censor Google is an act of aggression against Google and all of its users. So, you are wrong. The cynical thing is for France to aggress against the entire free world.
>France's attempt to censor Google is an act of aggression against Google and all of its users.
Just to be clear, the argument here is that censoring Google is an act of aggression against Google and all of its users regardless of what is being censored. So forcing Google to censor illegal material would be beholden to this argument as well?
If I'm French, and I want to be forgotten, then Google should forget me. If I'm American, and want to look at the life of my French friend - and can do so only because I'm not in France but rather in America - then why is it acceptable for Google to say "okay your friend is forgotten: only in France - here is the stuff they didn't want you to know".
Again this is is just cynical flaunting of sovereignty on Googles' part, and another example of a supra-national entity lauding its power over democratic governments.
Per the laws of where ever it has offices at. If it has a US office, it has to follow US law, even when the US law applies to behavior outside the US. If they do not, they face the penalty. For an example, consider sex tourism laws where a given act may be legal both in the US and in some other country, but leaving the US, going to the other country, and doing that act is still illegal in the US, and the US will prosecute you for it.
As a business grows larger and sets up multiple offices in many countries, this can make things quite complex.
Now, as to the original point, Google is required by many nations to censor certain material regardless of if that information only is kept in servers in some other country. Are these laws an act of aggression against Google? (Ignore for a second that Google would likely choose to censor most of that material anyways due to the negative publicity in not doing so, similar to reddit's banning of borderline legal subreddits not because the law, as they were borderline legal, but due to publicity.)
> or an example, consider sex tourism laws where a given act may be legal both in the US and in some other country, but leaving the US, going to the other country, and doing that act is still illegal in the US, and the US will prosecute you for it.
Do you have a cite for that please?
As I understand it the "sex tourism" laws cover behaviour that is not legal in the US, but is legal in some other country. If a US citizen travels to that other country they're still breaking US law, even though they're not in the US and even though that activity is legal in the country they're visiting.
Also, for some activities, the travelling US citizen will face justice in the US for some crimes no matter what the legal status of that activity is.
>As I understand it the "sex tourism" laws cover behaviour that is not legal in the US, but is legal in some other country.
Well, in the best example, it is a bit complicated. Take age of consent. Within a state, state law rules. Between states, federal law rules. In most cases, federal law is stricter than state law. So it would be an action that would be legal in the state you were a resident of, but not in another state.
Also a counter example. Prostitution is illegal in most states, but it is, to a limited extent, legal for an American to engage in such abroad (much like it is legal for residents of Texas to go to Nevada).
In short, I believe there are laws that do what I describe and laws that do what you describe.
(Note I'm not a lawyer and the laws have changed a bit since I last read them.)
Google complies with French law within French borders. That's not the issue here, the question is whether France can compel Google out of France's borders. I think you've completely misunderstood the issue here.
Within French IP addresses you mean. I am in France and can access the "American internet" with a VPN easily. According to France Google is breaking the law because it let me access illegal search results from France. So France is just trying to enforce the law within their borders after all (at least, so they could say)
It seems to me it would make a lot more sense to charge you for bypassing the restriction than to charge Google for activities that occurred outside of France. Clearly the solution is to outlaw VPN usage for French citizens so they don't stray off the French internet.
From a legal perspective, hypotheticals about the Internet becoming the union of all restrictions worldwide isn't even the best argument. If we accept that Google can be compelled by France to be forced to hide some content from the entire world, then we must also accept that Google can be compelled by some other jurisdiction to be required to make that content available. It's the same power. The Republic of X may make its propaganda mandatory and the Breakaway Republic of X may ban it, and I'm only being generic to be polite, I could easily name specific examples of this sort of thing if the French precedent is to be accepted.
People can use VPN, so it's not very easy to know whether someone lives in France. That's all the problem IMO: some people here are saying "France: do whatever you want in your country but don't censor elsewhere". France could just answser: "very well, I just want this content not to be accessible in France, so do whatever you have to do, but respect our laws in France". And Google would have no choice to censor everywhere if it wants to comply since otherwise the search results would be accessible from France (through VPN).
I agree, it's pretty hard to know in this case whether the one breaking the law is the VPN provider (since is "smuggling" illegal search result into France) or the illegal search result provider.
EDIT: I wonder how it works for drugs for example: if someone sells drugs from a country where it's legal to France, could he be found guilty in France? (I am pretty sure the smuggler/dealer will ^^)
148 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadIf you only want to be subject to the authority of one jurisdiction, make sure your company doesn't have a presence anywhere else. That's not a guarantee, but it helps a lot.
One can debate the merits of the law all day long, but in the end all that matters is that a national government is sovereign within their own territory. If they want you to do something that you don't want to do, you can remove yourself from their jurisdiction, change their mind somehow, or do it anyway.
Even with super helpful full disclosure, it could take years just to find the legal entity they're interested in fining.
But nobody wants that. it's stupid.
I kinda sorta see the point about people in .fr can see stuff via .com that the government doesn't want them to see, but it sure seems like trying to legislate no rain on saturday.
Google is carefully taking a stand here.
Google is not the Internet. They are a multinational company who store search results in a series of databases created and managed by people. Those results can be changed if Google wants to do business in France and quite likely the EU if it all starts to escalate.
And I'll let you in on a secret. European startups would be more than happy to build the next Google.
That it's a red herring to the EU's greater trade regulatory problems?
France, if you want to have whatever little censored version of the internet locked in bureaucratic stranglehold, fine. But worldwide? GTFO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...
If the US can enforce their laws on the web, why should France, China, etc not be able to do so, too?
We have to be on a web where stuff like nude boobs is considered NSFW, where sites that allow users to sell used digital goods are instantly sued to death, etc.
These things are all based on a US-centric moral framework.
The whole web is full of that. And Google, a company that, until recently, was legally headquartered in Ireland, applies only the US moral standard for their products.
Even if I am in europe, I can’t upload a movie to YouTube that is allowed to be shown on TV in Germany during daytime just because the US moral standard says nude boobs are not okay.
If the US and its companies want to force their moral and legal standards upon us, we will force our standards upon them, too.
Which is one of the reasons why TTIP contains the "local IP" part: Only sparkling wine made in France may be called Champagner from then on, only Parmesan made in Italy may be called this, etc.
This is incredibly silly reasoning. Google enforces the standards it chooses (generally American standards, in this case, as it is an American company) on its own properties. That's quite a far cry from imposing your own set of values on a third-party service provider.
The equivalent would be to start your own service which imposes your own set of standards (which, I'll point out, exists in the form of DailyMotion and LiveLeak, among others), not to say "well if you get to apply your standards to your service then I get to apply my standards to your service."
If a German company operates within Germany with German customers completely legal according to German law, and then gets fucked over by US institutions forcing US banks to seize the money of that company just because the actions (which happened solely under German law) were not according to US law...
Then it is the exact same situation. If the US can dictate our companies laws, we can dictate their companies laws, too.
The Euro was made also to reduce the influence of the dollar for international trade, and especially the countries within the EU have almost no contact with the dollar anymore, nor do most companies here. Which makes sure the US can’t just seize their assets (like they used to seize assets of companies because "if they trade in dollar, they operate under US law")
If the argument is that the German population doesn't want them, then that's an internal issue and not the US' problem, as we negotiate with state actors, not citizens.
It's just like the NSA affair. And the fact that in the Microsoft case a US judge stated that, even though the servers in question were in Europe, the US could seize them because the internet was a US invention and the company had made business in the US just shows the issue: the US legal enforcement consistently oversteps nations boundaries.
A documentary that shows nude boobs can’t be uploaded by our state television to YouTube because Google forbids that.
Such a documentary DEFINITELY doesn’t belong on LiveLeak or PornHub or whatever either, though. It belongs on a platform like Vimeo or YouTube, where it’s forbidden due to US-American moral standards.
So upload it somewhere else. Google is a private company and as such is perfectly within its rights to allow or not allow activity based on arbitrary rules.
This argument is incoherent so it's not worth a further reply.
It is disingenuous to assume that all societies have the same ultra-liberal, privacy-be-damned, perspective, as appears to be prevalent in the anglo-saxon world, and it is healthy that some democratically elected governments should question Google's hegemony. It certainly doesn't appear to be the case that America's federal administration has anything but sycophantic praise for everything that Silicon Valley does.
France is free to set up their own version of the Great Firewall of China if they want to block Google.com within their borders. That's their recourse; demanding Google censor search results everywhere is not.
France is making a point that there is a legitimate argument to be discussed about things that happen in France not be pushed out to the rest of the planet. They may be wrong, but the debate is worth having. If Google doesn't like it, it is free to quit France, and the french will be free to punish their government for it.
It's silly argument: if you do this for all countries, you'll be left with a tiny intersection of only the content that is not illegal in some form somewhere on earth.
It is indeed a gray area, but what did you expect between the extreme black and white of individual freedom and corporate control/hegemony? Some sort of simple 'bit flip'?
Alas, precisely because the bits are so easily flipped, this discussion must be continued - and it must not be being conducted, so, reactively.
I am an advocate for the right to disappear. I happen to think, having witnessed the bit flip in the positive direction - i.e. mass-surveillance as a consumer - I also wish to remind my peers that it must be recognized that it can .. also .. just as easily be turned off.
In other words, French mores on the issue should infect American mores. It would be good for other cultures, other mores, to not let it go the other way: Total Surveillance as a normative.
In this sense, perhaps yet again, the French lead the way.
You seem to be fine with French law applying to American nationals - what do you think of sharia law applying to French nationals? How about the law-of-the-week declared by some upstart banana republic dictator? Who gets to pull the lever on global law? Where do you, fit2rule, draw the line - is it only France? Only countries where Google has operates? only western democracies? Or does every sovereign get to throw what they deem illegal into the pot?
And yes, I deem sovereign power more important than corporate power. Don't you?
America can do whatever it wants tax-wise to its own citizens. Copyright and bank integration has to do with existing trade agreements that are peer-shared and mutually respected. Russia is free to keep its assets within its own country if it doesn't want to participate in a larger system with shared rules.
The issue here is that France is trying to apply a local law that is not mutually agreed upon with any other country, to other countries. And in doing so is creating bad precedent regarding censorship extended across borders with no recourse. I can't challenge France's law in court as a US citizen, so why should I be denied access to information at their discretion?
That is what is happening in all of my points, including (the relatively minor) point a). Recall that it is not obvious that revenue earned in a country that is not America should be taxed by America.
More generally, someone democratic needs to challenge America once in a while, arguably for America's own health.
Here, your argument is even weaker because it is essentially "we give america power, and they use it".
The dollar's dominance is not america's fault, it's literally everyone else's :)
America has not militarily imposed it's will on france or any other european nation that i'm aware of in the recent past so i'm not sure you can really claim america forcing y'all to their point of view on that one.
If you think for a second that any country that has power will not use it against other countries in trade negotiations, that just seems ultra-naive to me.
"Recall that it is not obvious that revenue earned in a country that is not America should be taxed by America."
Hey, remember that time when france tried to tax all the Google revenue not earned in france by claiming google ireland has a permanent establishment in france (and then claims google owes it a billion in tax when the max google possibly earned was a total of 237 million in google france?)?
No worries though, i'm sure, unlike every other country, france wouldn't try to use it's power to force any other country or multi-national corporation to do anything. They'll only do the right thing.
I think this is a bit of hyperbole.
Past that, can you point to a time in history when a utopic state of happiness and rightness ruled (IE you got what you wanted) and the world still functioned?
The argument that France appears to be making in this case is that it doesn't need other countries to agree to its demands, its courts have jurisdiction everywhere.
I feel the difference is straightforward. The US has an interest in its world view and values being shared by the rest of the world and uses its economic power to get other countries to agree, at least in part, to enforcing that world view and values. They are not however (in general), asserting that decisions made in the US apply in other countries (except to our own citizens, wherein enforcement of the local US law is still at the discretion of the foreign nations while our citizens are within their borders).
If the US were to assert global jurisdiction for a decision made in a local (i.e., state or federal) court it would be equally unfounded. If, however, they were to negotiate with another country and use our economic advantage to get them to agree to enforcement of a particular policy, then the country has presumably weighed the pros and cons of that decision and decided it was worth the compromise. You don't have to like it, but if you skip the middle step sovereignty as a nation becomes meaningless.
Just like people agree to pay the mob protection money.
I mean, countries could refuse to go along with things like FATCA. It would be an enconomic disaster for them when the US freezes them out, but they could do it.
b and c are examples of mutually-agreed treaties/agreements. If france didn't want to do it, it shouldnt' have signed the treaties :)
d was a mostly-coalition force AFAIK (not my area of expertise), but let me just suggest that rules of starting/fighting wars is not quite the same as the right to be forgotten, and that this doesn't belong as an example because basically every country can be accused of starting wars to impose it's will unilaterally somewhere else. That's what war is :)
The limitations are severe: Since living in the US I am not allowed to hold certain financial products that I owned when living in Germany, since compliance with US law would be to costly for German institutions. In particular, citing wikipedia [1], "It requires non-US (foreign) financial institutions, such as banks, to enter into an agreement with the IRS to search through their customer databases to identify those customers suspected of being U.S. persons and to disclose the account holders' names, TINs, addresses, and the transactions of most types of accounts."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
Many more examples can be provided.
By that same measure it would be undemocratic to enforce French laws on non-French citizens who weren't able to participate in the elections of the representative who enacted them. Whatever chip on your shoulder you have about American companies or the actions of the American government do not change this fact.
The general mold (which AFAIK is quite similar across the EEC area, somewhat independent of the formation of the EEC/EU) -- is that a user has a right to a) make any (personal/sensitive) information stored is correct, and b) as an extension of various common legal principles one have the right to a new life after being acquitted, and after serving out a sentence.
Just those two things imply a need for a global accord on how data should be handled, indexed etc. The current RTBF framework is probably not the best approach -- but I think it misses the mark to simply equate it with censorship. Controlling information is of course technically censorship -- but there's a difference between having a legal recourse against defamation -- and erasing Tiananmen Square from history.
I do think we are right to be worried about the actual results of any legislation though.
If it wasn't so unlikely to actually get anywhere, one might want the UN, or the Haag to set up some form of accord -- as right to privacy, and right to manage information in digital archives (which are much more versatile, accessible, trivial to copy and linkable than traditional paper archives) have some definite overlap with human rights.
This isn't some insurmountable task; there appears to be wide co-operation on other kinds of data, such as child porn already -- even if the age of consent is very different in the (all of?) the US and much of Euorope.
A website that fulfills a search query by searching google.com, then searching google.fr, then searching google.cn. It shows the results to the google.com query but gives badges to results based on which governments appear to be censoring them.
"Seeking to balance the right to clarify the record and the right to freedom of expression, the [highest Constitutional Court in Colombia] held that the newspaper was not required to remove the article. The court did require the newspaper to update the published information and use “robots.txt” and “metatags” to prevent the indexing of the content by Google due to the particularly serious nature of the crime and the severe personal consequences for Gloria."
Columbia - University in NYC Colombia - Country in South America
I make so many spelling mistakes I hate to correct, but when I ready your first sentence I thought you might have meant the university.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia
I've been living in Bogotá for a few months and I only realised I was spelling Colombia wrong a couple of months in - pretty embarrassing.
I now notice many if not most of my English-speaking friends make the same mistake when emailing/facebooking/whatsapping me and I try to correct them as I go.
It appears Columbia is a reflex spelling of the sound of the word - I'm from the UK so haven't had that much exposure to the use of the word for the NY University, so I don't think that's the explanation in my case.
Someone should make a website for this along the lines of amispellingcolumbiacorrectly.com -> NO to spread the word ;-)
(The reflex spelling probably comes from the fact that most English speakers are primarily familiar with the English spelling of Christopher Columbus)
I meant correct in the context of trying to spell Colombia, the country name, given that's what I was talking about - obviously the spelling Columbia is correct if you're referring to anything else which actually goes by that spelling..
Currently a French citizen can have content from any website delisted, no matter where it's hosted, from google.fr.
Quite a few of his stories have been made into movies with Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") probably the best adaptation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick_bibliography#Fi...
And that was a full-length novel, later turned into a major motion picture, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Edit: it was adapted into that movie, then novelized afterward?
Edit2: http://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Piers-Anthony/dp/03807087...
Edit: yes, apparently: "In 1966, the late Philip K. Dick published the novelette "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." A movie based on the story will be released next year; this book is a novelization of the script and the original novel" -- http://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Piers-Anthony/dp/06880520...
https://www.google.com/about/careers/locations/paris/
Note that it should not take many bits to profile us in a way that is useful, while still respecting our privacy. For example, with about 33 bits of information, one can identify any individual on this planet. With less than this amount, one can still put you in a class of individuals, such that you get relevant search results.
What works is google.com/ncr or just use duckduckgo.
As for an example revenge porn, false public accusation or protection of witness are more in the spectrum of RTBF law than chinese-like censorship mentionned by Google. And correct me if I'm wrong but french RTBF apply only to individuals, so how could they even compare this with state censorsphip?
The bit where the state says they'll punish you if you don't comply---if you don't stop talking about the things they want kept quiet? That's state censorship. What else could it be?
It sounds like a end run around press freedom to me.
But again its strange because Google dont say they won't apply RTBF, they just say they will apply it on a per country basis... But from a technical standpoint this is even more complicated... So they basically say "we Google define the law" for everything that is "out" of your country.
Yet good luck to them defining what "out your country mean" in a global network.
I thought 'Right to be forgotten' was something organisation like EFF stand for.
(IE either we should give up an curtail press freedoms, or we should accept that society needs to be more accepting of reality. This intermediate state where we curtail the freedom of certain actors, but have decided another set get a pass, is what the EFF is complaining about)
As a citizen I would fell better knowing that a Law define what can and cannot be erase instead of bargaining on the promise of a Big Company : "Don't be evil"
An ideal solution would be that an international treaty globaly redefine for the best all the laws about copyright which are all utterly outdated and inappropriate for digital media.
(RTBF is as far I know is in France either a part or an extension of copyrights laws)
Because the EU and france forced google to control it. They didn't want to control it at all. They tried desperately not to. They wanted the source of these stories to be responsible for what they publish, and be forced to update or remove the stories.
Which seems much saner to me.
But excuse me if I prefer DuckDuckGo over Google on that matter :P
It's a problem of balancing privacy rights and press rights.
Yet the main method is to try to control secondary indexing instead of primary distribution?
If the published media has a negative effect on their life, why aren't they making the published media go away?
"Targeting the companies indexing the information is probably a more tractable problem then tracking down and eliminating all the sources."
I don't buy this. All of these sources need a way to print retractions/etc in these countries due to the way libel/etc laws work. So they already must have mechanisms to achieve this.
This is like targeting library card catalogs for indexing microfiche.
I don't think that's the reason:
> In 1995 the European Union adopted the European Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46EC) to regulate the processing of personal data.[9] This is now considered a component of human rights law.[10] The new European Proposal for General Data Protection Regulation provides protection and exemption for companies listed as “media” companies, like newspapers and other journalistic work. However, Google purposely opted out of being classified as a “media” company and so is not protected. Judges in the European Union ruled that because the international corporation, Google, is a collector and processor of data it should be classified as a “data controller” under the meaning of the EU data protection directive. These “data controllers” are required under EU law to remove data that is “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant, ” - making this directive of global importance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten
Yes, it is just for "citizens".
http://www.cnil.fr/linstitution/missions/proteger/
And you're right, it's not related to censorsphip at all.
It is probably a strategy from Google's lawyers to turn that in something against the "liberty". A sophism.
Censorship: the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts.
Isn't the suppression of "unacceptable" information the stated goal of the right to be forgotten?
News organizations can still publish articles about someone who invoked the RTBF, but nobody will read it because it's impossible to find.
In the bureaucratically definitive sense it's technically not censorship, it's just using a characteristic of the internet to make it censorship. At least, that's the writing on the wall.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/14/google-acc...
Very, very cynical - and Google have lost yet another point in their race to dominate culture as a corporate, global power..
Just to be clear, the argument here is that censoring Google is an act of aggression against Google and all of its users regardless of what is being censored. So forcing Google to censor illegal material would be beholden to this argument as well?
Google has the right to spread whatever it wants as long as it is not aggressing against other people in doing it.
Again this is is just cynical flaunting of sovereignty on Googles' part, and another example of a supra-national entity lauding its power over democratic governments.
As a business grows larger and sets up multiple offices in many countries, this can make things quite complex.
Now, as to the original point, Google is required by many nations to censor certain material regardless of if that information only is kept in servers in some other country. Are these laws an act of aggression against Google? (Ignore for a second that Google would likely choose to censor most of that material anyways due to the negative publicity in not doing so, similar to reddit's banning of borderline legal subreddits not because the law, as they were borderline legal, but due to publicity.)
Do you have a cite for that please?
As I understand it the "sex tourism" laws cover behaviour that is not legal in the US, but is legal in some other country. If a US citizen travels to that other country they're still breaking US law, even though they're not in the US and even though that activity is legal in the country they're visiting.
Also, for some activities, the travelling US citizen will face justice in the US for some crimes no matter what the legal status of that activity is.
Well, in the best example, it is a bit complicated. Take age of consent. Within a state, state law rules. Between states, federal law rules. In most cases, federal law is stricter than state law. So it would be an action that would be legal in the state you were a resident of, but not in another state.
Also a counter example. Prostitution is illegal in most states, but it is, to a limited extent, legal for an American to engage in such abroad (much like it is legal for residents of Texas to go to Nevada).
In short, I believe there are laws that do what I describe and laws that do what you describe.
(Note I'm not a lawyer and the laws have changed a bit since I last read them.)
Block a new ip address every 3-8 hours depending on what os is backing things?
"I recognize that the Council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid ass decision, I have elected to ignore it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOEr7kiysrE
Well, duh! Governments WANT this.
Ip geolocating can work to identify if someone lives in france. Client living in France => serve content based on french laws.
They could comply and say to he cnil "if vpn is bothering you, then you should regulate vpn use".
EDIT: I wonder how it works for drugs for example: if someone sells drugs from a country where it's legal to France, could he be found guilty in France? (I am pretty sure the smuggler/dealer will ^^)