
In the battle of free speech now it’s France v Google - vuldin
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/09/battle-free-speech-france-google-right-to-be-forgotten
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cromwellian
What is free speech if the state acts to prevent anyone from finding what you
published?

Imagine a despotic regime that allowed it's citizens to publish or say
whatever they wanted, with the only restriction being it had to be in an empty
auditorium.

Is Baidu or Yandex going to comply with RTBF? As soon as people know you can't
find something in Google globally, they'll just work around it. Metacrawlers
will return which just query every search engine.

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ocdtrekkie
I wouldn't call it 'free speech'. That's what Google is marketing it as, but
it's really 'privacy law'. Nothing about RTBF is about preventing people from
speaking, people are still free to put whatever they want on the Internet,
wherever they want to. However, stories which violate an individual's privacy
which do not have relevance to the public interest are being restricted from
being a permanent stain on their reputation.

(And the only potential First Amendment issue in the US, is because somehow
the Citizens United decision gives our companies Constitutional rights, which
is silly.)

Arguably, France's problem with Google's refusal to implement this globally is
that Google doesn't prevent French users from visiting other countries' Google
websites, like say, google.ca. So Google isn't really providing a good faith
effort to uphold the French law, even in France.

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dragonwriter
> I wouldn't call it 'free speech'. That's what Google is marketing it as, but
> it's really 'privacy law'.

The two are overlapping. Privacy laws _in general_ are restrictions on free
speech, and privacy laws restricting the manner in which true, _already
publicly disseminated_ , information -- including on some matters of public
concern (and criminal acts are _by definition_ matters of public concern) --
can be disseminated are pretty much the _pinnacle_ of free speech concerns.

> (And the only potential First Amendment issue in the US, is because somehow
> the Citizens United decision gives our companies Constitutional rights,
> which is silly.)

It would be equally a First Amendment concern in the US if companies did not
have Constitutional rights but were merely vehicles through which individuals
(who have Constitutional rights of their own) act.

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ocdtrekkie
RTBF is primarily meant to redact "untrue" information, so, I find your first
response to be... somewhat questionable. In many cases, what RTBF is blocking
is libel. I suppose the notion of "information not relevant to the public
interest" may fall under the debate, but most of the claims of
"censorship!!!!" clearly focus on concerns that are NOT affected by RTBF laws.

Google's search algorithm has no right to free speech, actually, unless we'd
like to define it as an artificial person and grant it Constitutional rights
too.

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dragonwriter
> Google's search algorithm has no right to free speech

Google's search algorithm is a tool which the people for whom "Google" is
simply a legal construct used as a vehicle use in the course of exercising
their right to free speech. Restricting the information that can be presented
through this tool is restricting those people's right to free speech.

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ocdtrekkie
I don't know if I feel like that would hold up in court. Google's algorithm
isn't helping individuals at Google construct speech, it's arguably collecting
it's own data and presenting it's own results, merely according to guidelines
it was taught or programmed with.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Google's algorithm isn't helping individuals at Google construct speech,
> it's arguably collecting it's own data and presenting it's own results

Google's algorithm isn't a independent agency, its a tool created by humans
for a human purpose.

