3 ms·

I 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 la

by gengkev 11y ago

I 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?

tremon 11y ago
> Why should France be allowed to control what Google (an American company) does outside of France? According to that logic, why would the US be allowed to control what BP (a British company) does in international waters, as it did with the Deepwater Horizon fiasco? Perhaps because what BP did there affected US soil and citizens? > Why should its operations in France be subject to the laws of every other country Google operates in, and vice versa? That is not a requisite for this discussion. Google aggregating and publishing information on French citizens is a French matter. If you need to frame it in legal terms, consider it an export control on personal data. Since the data owner is in France (according to EU law), the governing jurisdiction regarding that data is also French law. So if French law says that Google should no longer publish it, that applies to the local data as well as the exported copies.
- gengkev 11y ago
  > Perhaps because what BP did there affected US soil and citizens? When a French user uses Google.com, it's they who are requesting the information. It's not as if Google is actively pushing search results from Google.com into France, like BP's oil pushed itself onto the US coast. > Since the data owner is in France (according to EU law), the governing jurisdiction regarding that data is also French law. Again, I have no legal experience with these sorts of issues, but from your argument it seems that the website owner ought to be the one who is responsible for publishing the data. Google search results are merely a reflection of that content, and that reflection is under US jurisdiction. And if France has no way to force the website owner to take down their content, then why should Google then be responsible, just because it also has operations in France?

by gengkev 11y ago

tremon 11y ago

> Why should France be allowed to control what Google (an American company) does outside of France? According to that logic, why would the US be allowed to control what BP (a British company) does in international waters, as it did with the Deepwater Horizon fiasco? Perhaps because what BP did there affected US soil and citizens? > Why should its operations in France be subject to the laws of every other country Google operates in, and vice versa? That is not a requisite for this discussion. Google aggregating and publishing information on French citizens is a French matter. If you need to frame it in legal terms, consider it an export control on personal data. Since the data owner is in France (according to EU law), the governing jurisdiction regarding that data is also French law. So if French law says that Google should no longer publish it, that applies to the local data as well as the exported copies.

gengkev 11y ago
> Perhaps because what BP did there affected US soil and citizens? When a French user uses Google.com, it's they who are requesting the information. It's not as if Google is actively pushing search results from Google.com into France, like BP's oil pushed itself onto the US coast. > Since the data owner is in France (according to EU law), the governing jurisdiction regarding that data is also French law. Again, I have no legal experience with these sorts of issues, but from your argument it seems that the website owner ought to be the one who is responsible for publishing the data. Google search results are merely a reflection of that content, and that reflection is under US jurisdiction. And if France has no way to force the website owner to take down their content, then why should Google then be responsible, just because it also has operations in France?