entremet
Member
People have a bias toward consistency, or the old ways of doing things.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
France trying to impose global Google censorship
- Thread starter cntr
- Start date
- Status
People have a bias toward consistency, or the old ways of doing things.
That will be fun when the European Union also demands this considering the amount of revenue Google generates in Europe. In the end, you're just suggesting to have them leave a market with 500 million people where they have a 90% market share. They'll sooner comply than anything else.
I seem to be seeing DMCA notices on my European Google too. For fun sake, even translated to Dutch yet pointing out that it is an American DMCA request. The US also has FATCA in applying US laws in Europe but that is a bit more general and independent from the internet.
No, they just have a president that likes companies to pay taxes. Uber especially doesn't work in a system where they circumvent all taxes and get rewarded for it.
Robot Carnival
Member
edit: some how double post
LoveCake
Member
Google should just pull out of France & basically IP ban the entire country.
Furthermore Google & other search engines shouldn't have to deal with the checking & de-listing they should either make a charge to do it or refuse to do anything & the person who wants stuff removed has to go to the websites showing the content.
I don't understand how this law can stand anyway, because it has been ruled many times in countries around the world that Google & search engines cannot be held responsible for things found in searches, torrenting, illegal downloads etc
Furthermore Google & other search engines shouldn't have to deal with the checking & de-listing they should either make a charge to do it or refuse to do anything & the person who wants stuff removed has to go to the websites showing the content.
I don't understand how this law can stand anyway, because it has been ruled many times in countries around the world that Google & search engines cannot be held responsible for things found in searches, torrenting, illegal downloads etc
No, we have a president beholden to a lobby.
His staff for his election had a very prominent guy who has a huge stake in taxis.
He doesn't give a shit if companies pay their taxes.
True Savior
Member
First the highway robbery that was the Euro 2000 against Portugal and now this ?
Please go take a bath.
Please go take a bath.
I think it's an interesting case and France is more forward looking than technophobic. Now we may hope that a more transparent society leads to more tolerant attitudes and acceptance of past faults, but I'm quite sure that will not happen. So do we have a right to have something forgotten if it's not illegal? Many records are struck clean - even your credit will bounce back one day if you default - so why should you be tied to your online history?
Ah, as I expected this is France pushing too much
http://www.wsj.com/articles/french-...le-to-expand-right-to-be-forgotten-1434098033
This lady is nuts.
How does FATCA affect anyone other than US citizens?
As for the DMCA, its founded on the WIPO treaties, just like the Copyright Directives. I might be mistaken, but aren't the Copyright Directives enforceable outside the EU as well?
Well, to be fair, the case in EU started in Spain.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/french-...le-to-expand-right-to-be-forgotten-1434098033
This lady is nuts.
How does FATCA affect anyone other than US citizens?
As for the DMCA, its founded on the WIPO treaties, just like the Copyright Directives. I might be mistaken, but aren't the Copyright Directives enforceable outside the EU as well?
Well, to be fair, the case in EU started in Spain.
Regardless of the idealism behind it, it's simply not a problem that can be solved in such a way. It's like governments claiming that encryption is bad because they need backdoors in order to catch terrorists. So then they take Apple to secret court and threaten them with insane fines until they comply.
Ah... yes?
gutter_trash
Banned
France is more behind on internet savyness especially when you compare them to their neighbor to the South, Spain which is more internet savvy
even little Portugal is way more advanced in internetism than France
WTF am I reading.
I still remember that game. Good times.
Actually, it's exactly the opposite than adding back doors. It's about giving control to individuals on their search history, empowering individual over collective freedom.
Raonak
Banned
Problem is, now france can add things it wants to hide to the "right to be forgetten" list. Cases of police brutality? A celeberity scandal? Government corruption? The main problem is that this is global in scale, as the law says, it must be enacted in their .com domains too.
This also allows any other country to enact the same laws. This is massively crippling to google search engine.
Its ridiculous.
The laws actually do not concern such things. Those things are protected under the press freedom we actually have in the EU. I for one do not see why an American company should have the right to publish information about me without my consent, I'm not a celebrity. And many Europeans agree about this.
While you are certainly right that other countries can enact such laws to prevent press freedom and objective reporting, I'm not sure how effective that would be. Google is already blocking content on a global scale, which may be legal or not illegal in some countries, for example access to movie streaming websites.
Monty Mole
Member
Pretty sure Google is a business, relying on advertising revenue. And in a country of 66m population, why on earth would they pull out? With regards to other posts here, it makes no sense for Google to encourage the French to use other regions of Google, as advertising and sponsored search results are regionally targeted.
Google isn't 'publishing' shit.
They are linking to publicly available information, that everyone has a right to access.
The fact that Google has been forced to block stuff previously, doesn't mean going further in the direction of censorship is a positive. Every step we take in this direction leads to a less open and less free internet.
Also, it doesn't really protect freedom of the press the way the law is implemented. The way the law is implemented forces companies like google to block things without any chance for the publisher to respond to the claims, the content just gets blocked and the publisher is not even notified(how can you have a free press when it is possible to just make what you publish invisible, and no one even tells you about it). They get a takedown notice, they must remove the content or face fines and penalties, even if the content is something that the is of legitimate public interest. We know this has already been abused by directors of publicly traded companies to remove access to information that they are REQUIRED BY LAW to publicly reveal. How to you claim a right to privacy on mandatory disclosures? This is not sensitive private information, this is public information that needs to be searchable. It is 100% possible(it's already happening) for people in power to use this 'right' to hide their misdeeds from the public.
It's a terrible idea and an even worse implementation.
CadetMahoney
Member
man, Go away France.
Raonak
Banned
What difference should being a celebrity or not make? Everybody would (or should) be entitled to the same right regardless of how famous you are. Whether it be a student, a teacher, a cop, a ceo.
Google aren't the ones publishing the information either. They're merely acting as a bridge to that information. EU should be going after the source.
Also, why would France based search engine get treated any differently?
theusedversion
Member
Serious question: Why doesn't Google just use Google.com for everything and have the site be dynamic and change according to IP address (or whatever location/language you set via login)? Then they don't have to abide by these stupid laws and can keep their servers in countries that don't give them trouble. I think Europe would be ok if their searches took a few milliseconds longer because the servers are further away.
Or can they keep the country specific domains without hosting the site within that country and thereby free from the laws governing them?
Or can they keep the country specific domains without hosting the site within that country and thereby free from the laws governing them?
They're both US laws affecting EU residents. There is clearly a precedent for stuff like this. For the DMCA stuff, this happens even if the US and EU copyright holders aren't the same.
Because they like Europe's tax havens which are saving them a lot of money, money they also partially generate in Europe which they don't want to stop.
They already made that difference since the original verdict. The information existing doesn't give Google the right to process and rank it. That is why Google isn't allowed to use it. They're forcing Google to actually follow the 1995 Data Protection Directive. Google also brought it on themselves, they had an out years ago.
Palette Swap
Member
It costs banks a lot of money to be compliant. They need to review all their accounts for evidence of an interest by a US person (and yes, it affects a lot more than just US citizens), and a lot of work. That's why a lot of banks refuse US persons as account holders.
Look at all these due diligence compliance activities:
http://www.ird.govt.nz/resources/5/...due-diligence-guidance-notes-30-july-2014.pdf
How do you figure Google "need" France at all? Why would Google risk alienating their current user base (billions) to kowtow to France (60 million?)?
Yeah, Google needs France more than it needs Google.
Until Google blocks all French IPs and millions of people wake up to find out that their government removed the thing they need to use the internet.
The right to privacy is a fundamental human right that has been part of the universal declaration of human rights since the beginning. The EU's interpretation may be too liberal (or the US government doesn't care for the privacy of its people depending on where you stand). But the dictatorship argument doesn't make a lot of sense. Or you'd have to argue that the US is censoring the world by not allowing Google to index and refer child pornography sites. That may be the case, but the UDHR should be leading.
Alx
Member
Are you comfortable with the idea that a company is in control of the internet, and governments can't do anything about it ?
No.
But I'd want nobody to be in control of the internet. At least if it's Google, I can always use alternatives by typing in a url for another search engine. But if it's a government, which can censor the entire internet, shut down companies, or even arrest me personally, for refusing to comply, that's far worse.
Google is huge in Europe. It has more than 90% of the search engine market, it has 75% of the smartphone market, ... Bing actually holds about a quarter of the American search engine market, Apple has a higher smartphone market share. It would be alienating its most popular market, because this is certainly not something that is unique to France. Google doesn't have China and Russia, it is smaller in the USA which is already smaller than the European Union, it doesn't have the strongest position in most Asian countries, the Middle East is reliant on 'faith-based' search engines. It is the undefeatable market leader in the EU and allied countries.
And that's why Google is fighting this. Google is a for-profit business, but even it realizes the long term implications if it caves.
pants
Member
This.
Some of the replies in here are tormentingly reactive and purposefully trying to miss the point and context of the right to be forgotten.
Could they just block Google for themselves?
We hold the right of free speech above that of the right to be forgotten, and dislike that France is tryng to force this on all of us.
And no, the US isn't good about this either.
pants
Member
That's not the point of it. The point isnt covering your eyes and pretending it doesnt exist. If I end my membership with say playboy online, I should be able to request that they delete every single piece of personal information about me that isnt a line in their general ledger if I wanted. The same goes for information google/amazon/facebook has collected on you if you choose to end the association, or just feel like it because.
This doesn't work if you say 'but yeah only stuff in the France datacenter'
More or less.
How about just request deletion of French citizen info and block locally?
Edit: oh crap that doesn't cover information from other sites. Nvm ignore me.
There's a difference between asking a website to remove your data from a database and making a website effectively inaccessable without effort.
Phoenix
Member
No, like the US copyright companies are trying to do by censoring content and preventing piracy which many pirates escape by moving their servers to places in Europe where the laws governing some of the rights is different.
This is a slippery slope if I ever saw one in practice and in principle. If France says that they have a right to be forgotten, what happens when the US copyright folks start going after companies saying that VPN providers are obligated to log all of the activity of all of their users as they are required to do for a variety of reasons here in the US.
In the world that we're creating from this - whose laws reign supreme since they are being allowed to go cross borders?
pants
Member
Information privacy/data protection is the biggest driving force of the right to be forgotten last i checked, yes this specific part of the right to be forgotten can be abused, but please remember this isn't corporations, governments etc that will be requesting to have this applied it is individuals like you and me. Most commonly people will just refer to this to ensure their data is deleted when they unsub to services or opt out of being profiled, then you'll have less people looking to this when there was some kind of scandal they'd rather keep private.
CyclopsRock
Member
It's called AskDiddier.
I'm not a huge fan of this protection. The pathway to hell is paved with good intentions and all that. I don't think the "right to be forgotten" is something that should be enshrined in law, because I don't think it's a reasonable right to have in the first place. Generally I'm not keen on positive rights.
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked