4 ms·
The article brushes aside the major issue with how the French are trying to enforce this, which is that the French government is asserting that its law should a
by avar 11y ago
The article brushes aside the major issue with how the French are
trying to enforce this, which is that the French government is
asserting that its law should apply to all global properties of an
international corporation simply because it has a subsidiary operating
in France.
A quote from Google on the matter:
"we respectfully disagree with the idea that a national data
protection authority can assert global authority to control the
content that people can access around the world."
The author brushes this aside with the assertion that:
"search engine results aren’t ‘free speech’ to begin with in my
opinion, they’re re-hashings of someone else’s speech."
And doesn't address the inherent problem with a global company being
subject to the combination of the censorship regulation of all the
countries in which it operates.
What is Saudi Arabia decides to start punishing Google because its
image search shows "revealing" images of women, is that just fine
because search engine results aren't free speech anyway, and any
nation on earth should be able to make laws about search results that
apply globally?
- mattmanser 11y agoGoogle collect this data on French soil, and then export it abroad. Why is it so hard to understand that the condition to allowing them to collect the data in the first place is that they respect the local law about that data?
- jbob2000 11y agoInteresting thought about data being exported, I had never looked at it that way. From the French perspective, data is like a new "resource", and Google is the mighty data baron, in the era of the "data rush".
- icebraining 11y agoI don't think that France wants to block the results globally, they just want Google to block the results from French connections. The problem is that Google doesn't block those results if the French user goes to Google.com instead of Google.fr. Besides, the ruling only applies to information about EU citizens, so a better analogy would be if Saudi Arabia wanted to block revealing images of Saudi women.
- tremon 11y agoWhy shouldn't the results be blocked/removed globally? If the data subject is a french citizen and the publication is from a french newspaper, why shouldn't the effect be global?
- avar 11y agoBecause France can't have its cake and eat it too. It participates in international commerce, so that information makes it across borders (e.g. French newspapers will be sold in the US), at that point France loses the ability to censor information outside their borders, as it's in a different legal jurisdiction.
- saurik 11y agoAs a United States citizen, if I go to another country to do something that would be illegal on American soil, I am still committing a crime in my home country and can be subject to bring prosecuted for it when I return: unless Google is willing to exit France and close its French offices and shit down its French data centers, then they should absolutely be subject to French law everywhere, as they are a single entity operating globally. Essentially: you have the situation backwards: Google "can't have its cake and eat it too", and by "participating in international commerce" it has to abide by the laws in every jurisdiction in which it wishes to participate, not picking and choosing the laws based on where it happens to be a the moment.
- gengkev 11y agoI still can't fathom how the search results on Google.com ought to be controlled by the laws of every country that Google operates in. (Surely, some of those laws contradict each other.) Why should France be allowed to control what Google (an American company) does outside of France? It seems fair that the French government should get to control Google.fr. But if they don't like what's on Google.com, then they should simply block the domain, like China does with its Great Firewall or the UK does with adult websites. It's nearly tantamount to censorship, anyway. Firstly, please excuse my lack of legal knowledge. It seems to me that Google is analogous like a US citizen operating in France, where it is subject to the laws of the US and France. Why, however, should its operations in France be subject to the laws of every other country Google operates in, and vice versa?
- marrs 11y agoI don't understand the problem. What would be wrong with a country punishing Google for breaking the law in that country?
- ChristianBundy 11y agoBecause the malicious server that's publishing revealing photos of women isn't in Saudi Arabia, it just happens to be connected to Saudi Arabia.
- marrs 11y agowhere it can be blocked.
- belorn 11y agoPeople who owns or works at a global company should be treated as everyone else with no special treatment or consideration. If you break the law outside the boundaries of a countrey, there are rules defined in treaties on how to proceed. France could for example issue a international arrest warrant and demand extradition of the site operator, in the same way that US is doing to the owner of MegaUpload. Alternative, they could do as many other nations and ignore the people who operate a website they find illegal, but then block the offending website like nations has done with the pirate bay. The question is then, what do you do with people who puts up drive-by malware on websites. Is that something for a international arrest warrant, even if you normally deal with illegal websites by blocking? Is operating such site different from operating some other kind of illegal website? Should we just give computer criminals a free pass from arrest warrants in order to avoid putting global companies under the combined law of every country in the world? Personally I find that this to be such a complex issues that it would be better if there was new treaties that addressed which kind of crimes should be enforced globally, and in what ways.