It must be getting lonely for Google in the battle over Europe’s increasingly extraterritorial demands regarding the (misnamed) “right to be forgotten.” As Europe raises the stakes yet again, Google is still not seeing any support from the Obama administration.
To review, in May 2014, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that European citizens can demand that search engines such as Google delete information under their name that is out of date, irrelevant, or inflammatory. The ECJ calls this the “right to be forgotten,” but, as Google has pointed out, it is more appropriate to think of it as “the right to delist.” It should be underscored that this pertains not to private information, but information that originates in public records of some sort: newspapers, magazines, television or other media and public sources. It should also be noted that European officials then placed responsibility for administering the requests squarely on Google, a private corporation, rather than a public regulator. Reluctantly, and under protest, Google has taken up this duty, and has as of March 2015 reviewed some quarter of a million requests from politicians, criminals, public figures and ordinary citizens. It has accepted less than half (41 percent) of the deletion requests and removed them from European domains (Google.fr, etc.)
France’s new demand: Make “right to be forgotten” global
In the latest skirmish, France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, has raised the stakes and demanded that Google apply the delisting worldwide, on all versions of its search engines. It argues that “in order to be effective, delisting must be carried out on all extensions of the search engine and that the service provided by Google search constitutes a single processing.” In effect, the French government, extrapolating from the original ECJ decision, is mandating that a US-based multinational follow the extraterritorial dictates of a national regulator on a worldwide basis. Failure to comply would result in daily fines of about $330,000.
Google is pushing back. It has rejected the CNIL order, and has appealed to the body to rescind the decision. The CNIL responded that it would review the case and make a decision within two months. A CNIL spokeswoman stated: “We have noted Google’s arguments, which are in part political.” And then she added dismissively: “The CNIL for its part has relied only on legal reasoning. There is no effectiveness if the right is applied only in Europe.”
In a blog post Thursday, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, Peter Fleischer, adopted a firm, but conciliatory stance. As a general rule, Google argued: “We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access. […]As a matter of principle, therefore, we respectfully disagree with the CNIL’s assertion of global authority.”
For the company, Fleischer further pointed out the worldwide implications of the CNIL demands: “If the CNIL’s proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom. In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place.” In specific support of this claim, Google noted “innumerable examples around the world where content that is declared illegal under the laws of one country would be deemed legal in others.” For example: Thailand criminalizes speech critical of the king; Turkey goes after any speech thought critical of Ataturk; and Russia outlaws speech deemed to be “gay propaganda.”
The missing response from the Obama administration
The key question is why the Obama administration hasn’t taken a stand and stepped in to defend the legitimate interests of a beleaguered US company – and more broadly the principle of allowing accurate, public data to move freely across borders, without encountering censorship or parochial restrictions. These are the goals for the Internet that the US is touting as essential for the proposed US-EU free trade agreement. And the EU’s escalating protectionist, extraterritorial demands on the “right to be forgotten” directly flout such ambitions.
Either on a separate bilateral basis, or in the context of the US-EU FTA negotiations, the Obama administration should take a strong stand against arbitrary “delisting” of accurate, already published data, and the fragmentation of the Internet inherent in French regulatory demands.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/1P0jYTw
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment