The war between France and Google — with France demanding that Google act as a global censor, and Google appealing France’s edicts — shows no signs of abating, and the casualty list could easily end up including most of this planet’s residents.
As soon as the horrific “Right To Be Forgotten” (RTBF) concept was initially announced by the EU, many observers (including myself) suspected that the “end game” would always be global censorship, despite efforts by Google and others to reach agreements that could limit EU censorship to the EU itself.
This is the heart of the matter. France — and shortly we can be sure a parade of such free speech loathing countries like Russia, China, and many others — is demanding that Google remove search results for third-party materials on a global basis from all Google indexes around the world.
What this means is that even though I’m sitting right here in Los Angeles, if I dare to write a completely accurate and USA-legal post that the French government finds objectionable, France is demanding the right to force Google (and ultimately, other search engines and indexes) to remove key references to my posting from Google and other search results. For everyone. Everywhere. Around the world. Because of … France.
It’s nonsensical on its face but incredibly dangerous. It’s a dream of every dictator and legions of bureaucrats down through history, brought to a shiny 21st century technological reality.
You don’t have to be a computer scientist to realize that if every country in the world has a veto power over global search results, the lightspeed race to the lowest common denominator of sickly search results pablum would make Einstein’s head spin.
Proponents of these censorship regimes play the usual sorts of duplicitous word games of censorship czars throughout history. They claim it’s for the good of all, and that it’s not “really” censorship since “only” search results are involved.
Well here’s something you can take to the bank. Let’s leave aside for the moment the absolute truth that — given the enormous scale of the Web — hiding search results is effectively largely the same as hiding most source content itself as far as most people are concerned. But even if we ignore this fact, the truth of the matter is that it won’t be long before these same governments are also demanding the direct censorship of source material websites as well as search results.
However small the “forbidden information” leakage past the censorship of search results themselves, government censors will never be satisfied. They never are. In the history of civilization, they’ve never been satisfied.
A grand irony of course is that the very rise of Internet technology has been the potential enabler of centrally-mandated censorship to a degree never imagined even twenty years ago. For those of us who’ve spent our professional lives working to build these systems to foster the open spread of information, seeing our technologies turned into the tools of tyrants is disheartening to say the least.
It is however encouraging that firms like Google are continuing to fight the good fight against governments’ censorship regimes. Frankly, it will take firms on the scale of Google — along with support by masses of ordinary folks like us — to have any chance at all of keeping France and other governments around the world from turning the Internet into their own personal information control fiefdoms.
–Lauren–
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so — my opinions expressed here are mine alone.