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Comment by wumpus | Hacker News Reader

There's one big difference, and it's Orwellian -- courts and politicians are claiming that removing something from a search engine isn't censorship.

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Yup, essentially "we're not blocking any content, just blocking any means for you to find it".

That and answering questions isn't considered speech when the thing answering is a search engine.

I’m a guy who builds search engines incorporating some human curation and editorial policies, ... I’m pretty sure I could make a strong case that the 1st Amendment covers me in the US.

To be fair, those are two different things.

The end result is the same -- people are less informed.

In general it is always impossible to have this conversation because the idea of "free speech" is very different in America compared to Europe.

As I understand it, Google only blocks this stuff for searches from the EU. So all you need is a VPN with a non-EU IP address, and you can find whatever. Right?

While valid, only a fraction of the population would know to do this, and then a smaller fraction would believe it's worthwhile. It's an added inconvenience that has to outweigh the disadvantages of not doing it.

True. And thanks for confirming my supposition. It's rare to see this mentioned in coverage of the issue. For reasons that are understandable, I guess.

The EU has pressured Google to censor its results globally, as I recall. But Google has prevailed on that, at least. So far, anyway.

Even if Google can resist the EU about global censorship, small search engines can't afford to.

True.

Or they just don't do business in the EU. Lots of US businesses (and, for that matter Chinese, Japanese, etc.) just do business in their home countries. To the degree the EU makes it too difficult for certain types of businesses to operate there, they won't. It's a big market but it's not that big. If businesses can pull out of China because they can't reasonably operate there, they can pull out of Europe.

Further if Europe can ask for info to be censored what happens when 100 other nations ask the same for their own reasons. Will the search index be composed only of data that is acceptable to all parties?

Yes, that is a foreseeable outcome.

But Google would probably say "no" to many of them.

When EU dictates what can be in the search index it is "right to be forgotten".

When China or Russia does it, it's at least "censorship", and probably also "dictatorship".

Well, Google already left China.

You're missing an even bigger issue. How would know that your search results are missing something in the first place?

You're not going to use a VPN to search "from another country" unless you already know or suspect something but can't find any information on it and suspect the reason is because you are searching from the EU rather than the USA!

Google says so at the bottom of the page if results have been removed for your search

For now.

You are correct, and they will likely change that or face heavy fines, now that they have lost this case.

Really, over this one little case?

That would suck.

It's been going on since 2010 in the Costeja case

and they lost the case in 2014 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Spain_v_AEPD_and_Mario_...), and 'interpreted it' as 'we'll just limit the results from Europe'. This was a landmark case, and they just keep losing them.

What stops them from continuing to interpret it that way?

Edit: So yes, I see https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/respect-european-law-goog...

So what, Google could nuke all of its business operations in the EU, I suppose.

well even if it is not. it's just so easy to just search another engine. it actually got easier to identify people who wanted to hide stuff.

What other engine? As far as I know there are only a handful of search engines. Everyone else gets their data from these engines. Google, Bing, the French one. Probably one or two more.

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