Google’s French subsidiary has been ordered to pay heavy fines by the French Court unless it removes defamatory articles across its network.
While Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) says that all options are on the table and it already has a policy of removing links to defamatory articles. The Google Inc already lost a law suit case of trademark back in 2004 in France. The analysts suggest that Google should do as the court says or else risk losing its operational activities and profit margins in the country.
Google had another ruling passed against it in May when the European Court of Justice ordered Google to take down certain content that was defamatory to Mario Costeja Gonzalez. The French ruling may also start a new trend of not only punishing the subsidiary but also the parent company itself. The case started after Google refused to remove a few specific search results, which the European users claimed were violating their privacy. According to a transparency report Google released recently, the company since May Google has received 144,907 requests to remove such content from its search engine. Among 500,000 page links Google has only removed 170,506, which is only 41.8 % of the total requests and refused to remove the remaining 237,561, which is 58.2% of the results.
The first ruling came in May by European Union court of justice which came to be known as the right to be forgotten. According to the ruling the European users can ask Google to remove any links or articles, which they believe contains information that might affect their privacy.
The search engine has been forced to comply. The targeted users can fill out and post an online form to request that certain link contains their private information and hence should be removed. Even though Google highly criticized it and proclaimed it as a disappointing ruling for search engines and online Publishers in general, but the company has had to comply with a few requests.
Google claims that any third party can post information over the internet and the company has no control over it. It may remove the link in the search results but the information will still be actively present on the internet and can either be accessed manually or by any other search engine.
Until now the decision only affects the European region where France has the most requests, mounting up to 28,898 requests, Germany takes second place with 24,979 requests, followed by UK with 18,304, Spain with 13,360 and Italy with 11,379. Apart from Google’s own subsidiaries including YouTube, another search engine badoo.com has also received similar requests with 2208 URL’s ordered to be removed.
The search engine receives all types of requests; one of the requests was from a woman who asked Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) to take down content regarding her husband’s murder; the content had her name as well. In another case a rape victim requested to take down the link about an article regarding her incident. The decision of which link to take down and which one to leave can be very challenging for the search engine. To make the right decision Google has formed an advisory council, which discusses the requests and gives its verdict as it sees fit.