Google Questions & Unofficial Answers: "Is it true that France and other
countries are now demanding the right to censor Google Search Results for
everyone, everywhere on Earth? Isn't this 'Right To Be Forgotten' stuff getting
out of hand?"
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001160.html
(This is a new entry from my recently formed Google+ Community "Google
Questions & Unofficial Answers" -- located at:
https://plus.google.com/communities/111481685962796128662. )
Man, oh man. To use the vernacular, "You ain't just whistling Dixie!"
Yes and yes, the "Right To Be Forgotten" (RTBF) is going completely off
the rails, and the French government is indeed now claiming that it has
the power to control what Google users see around the the entire globe.
But it's actually even worse than that. Much worse. Because other
countries have already or will soon follow France's lead, triggering the
most expansive and potentially damaging quagmire of censorship in the
history of civilization -- a "race to the bottom" aimed at destroying
free speech planetwide.
Of course, no country openly frames this as an attack on freedom of
speech per se. Rather, they employ arguments such as claiming that
they're trying to protect their citizens from "unfair" or "unflattering"
third-party materials on the Internet (and by the way, irrespective of
whether those materials are actually accurate or not).
Note that in the RTBF context these governments are not usually trying
to block access to those actual Web pages containing the "undesirable"
content. Rather, they've been aiming at search engines -- mainly Google
to date -- in a disingenuous attempt to "hide" such pages by making them
difficult to locate, even though they still exist and could be accessed
if you knew the appropriate URLs.
Much like a prudish librarian who couldn't find a way to actually pull
from shelves those books of which she didn't approve, and so settled
instead on destroying the library catalog index cards that located those
books, European Union (EU) countries and now a growing cavalcade of
other nations are trying to "disappear" third-party search results from
Google.
One of the basic tenets of government censorship -- likely reaching back
to the caveman smearing out cave wall drawings that he found
objectionable -- is that censorship virtually always expands to suck
ever more oxygen out of free speech over time.
We can clearly see this phenomenon with RTBF, in ways that many
observers (including myself) have long predicted would come to pass.
Without getting into all the legal definitions and details here, Google
has to obey the laws in countries where it operates. But Google also has
an interest -- both to protect itself and its users around the world --
in pushing back when any given country tries imposing conditions that
actually exceed the statutory rights of that country, especially in the
kinds of international contexts in which large Internet firms operate
today. After all, why should the government of Country A have the right
to dictate censorship over the populations of countries B through Z?
So when the EU began formulating policies for submission, processing,
and determinations regarding RTBF requests, Google initially implemented
a procedure for removing the results for approved requests from the
individual location-specific versions of Google Search that users in
those countries access by default (e.g., for France, that's google.fr).
Almost immediately, EU censorship czars starting expanding their
censorship demands. They began complaining that their citizens still had
the ability to access other countries' localized versions of Google
Search -- and to access the primary international google.com itself --
as workarounds to find search results that their own governments deemed
inappropriate for their delicate sensibilities.
Recently, Google agreed to go a step further to satisfy the continuing
Orwellian demands of these governments, by actually blocking users in
those countries from directly accessing other localized or the
non-localized versions of Google, based on those users' origin IP
addresses.
But (you guessed it!) France instantly started complaining yet again.
They declared that Google's new restrictions weren't good enough,
because French citizens could still use tools such as proxies and
virtual private networks (VPNs) -- the same kinds of tools that
oppressed people around the world use to bypass an array of tyrannical
government Internet restrictions -- to see those verboten Google search
results on the "forbidden" versions of Google Search.
This brings us to today, with France going even further. They're now
asserting the right to force Google to remove search results essentially
on demand for all versions of Google Search, around the entire planet.
In other words, France claims the right to be the Internet censor not
only for France, but for every other country as well, and so for the
entire Earth's population.
In fact, it's not just France pushing this nightmarish vision. Early in
the discussions of RTBF, the EU was already suggesting that they'd
eventually want to move in this same direction. And countries like
Russia and China -- both of whom already operate extensive domestic
censorship regimes -- are following suit, practically drooling at the
idea of globally removing Google Search results that are embarrassing or
otherwise potentially disruptive to their dictatorial governments.
An Internet where each individual domestic government asserts the right
to impose its own ideas of censorship on a global basis is intolerable,
all the more so since we now depend on the Internet not only for so much
of our communications in general, but for freedom of speech in
particular -- with search engines like Google's being absolutely crucial
to this entire Internet ecosystem. The result would inevitably be a
"lowest common denominator" disaster for speech freedoms everywhere.
Again, all of this was predictable and predicted. The slippery slope was
obvious from the very start. When Wile E. Coyote races off the end of a
cliff while chasing the Road Runner, the fact that he remains suspended
in midair for a few seconds doesn't mean that he won't shortly be taking
the long fall down to the canyon floor.
Unless we put a stop to the expanding, increasingly abusive government
censorship represented by the "Right To Be Forgotten" and other similar
efforts rising around the world, free speech -- and all of us -- are in
for a very painful and damaging fall indeed.
Be seeing you.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein
Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently
doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.
_______________________________________________
pfir mailing list
http://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir
