The “right to be forgotten” dispute is a relatively modest one — a matter of differing priorities between the United States and Europe, which otherwise share the values of privacy and free expression. But in other parts of the world, speech prohibitions can be far more extreme. If the online platforms we depend on — not just Google, but also Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, WordPress, Cloudflare and more — were to globally enforce, say, Saudi Arabia’s blasphemy laws or Turkey’s law against insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the internet would change beyond recognition.
For now, very few countries are asking online platforms to enforce their national laws elsewhere. And the courts that are considering worldwide removal orders mostly sit in democratic and rights-respecting countries. That should give us some hope for better outcomes in those cases. But it also means that their decisions will carry a lot of weight, and set expectations for other national courts and lawmakers about their own power to make platforms globally remove content.
In Canada, for example, courts could still potentially modify an order, approved by the nation’s Supreme Court last year, requiring Google to globally block search results for websites related to a company involved in a dispute over trade secrets. A federal court in California found the order unenforceable in the United States, and Google went back to the Canadian courts in hopes of a different outcome. (I worked on this case in my previous job as a lawyer for Google.)
Another important case comes from Austria. A court there ordered Facebook to remove, everywhere in the world, a post that called a politician “corrupt” and a “traitor.” That case is also under review by the European Court of Justice.
Governments around the world know that while online platforms have historically enabled the free flow of information, that needn’t be the case forever. Technical intermediaries can just as easily become choke points, shutting down communication on prohibited topics. Governments of any country have at least some leverage to make this happen: National internet service providers can cut off access entirely. In 2016, for example, Malaysia blocked the entire Medium blogging platform for refusing to delete a London-based journalist’s accounts of corruption in the Malaysian government.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/opinion/google-right-forgotten.html