Google to France: We Won't Forget It for You Wholesale
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eff.org
France, if you want to have whatever little censored version of the internet locked in bureaucratic stranglehold, fine. But worldwide? GTFO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei...
If the US can enforce their laws on the web, why should France, China, etc not be able to do so, too?
We have to be on a web where stuff like nude boobs is considered NSFW, where sites that allow users to sell used digital goods are instantly sued to death, etc.
These things are all based on a US-centric moral framework.
The whole web is full of that. And Google, a company that, until recently, was legally headquartered in Ireland, applies only the US moral standard for their products.
Even if I am in europe, I can’t upload a movie to YouTube that is allowed to be shown on TV in Germany during daytime just because the US moral standard says nude boobs are not okay.
If the US and its companies want to force their moral and legal standards upon us, we will force our standards upon them, too.
Which is one of the reasons why TTIP contains the "local IP" part: Only sparkling wine made in France may be called Champagner from then on, only Parmesan made in Italy may be called this, etc.
This is incredibly silly reasoning. Google enforces the standards it chooses (generally American standards, in this case, as it is an American company) on its own properties. That's quite a far cry from imposing your own set of values on a third-party service provider.
The equivalent would be to start your own service which imposes your own set of standards (which, I'll point out, exists in the form of DailyMotion and LiveLeak, among others), not to say "well if you get to apply your standards to your service then I get to apply my standards to your service."
If a German company operates within Germany with German customers completely legal according to German law, and then gets fucked over by US institutions forcing US banks to seize the money of that company just because the actions (which happened solely under German law) were not according to US law...
Then it is the exact same situation. If the US can dictate our companies laws, we can dictate their companies laws, too.
The Euro was made also to reduce the influence of the dollar for international trade, and especially the countries within the EU have almost no contact with the dollar anymore, nor do most companies here. Which makes sure the US can’t just seize their assets (like they used to seize assets of companies because "if they trade in dollar, they operate under US law")
If the argument is that the German population doesn't want them, then that's an internal issue and not the US' problem, as we negotiate with state actors, not citizens.
It's just like the NSA affair. And the fact that in the Microsoft case a US judge stated that, even though the servers in question were in Europe, the US could seize them because the internet was a US invention and the company had made business in the US just shows the issue: the US legal enforcement consistently oversteps nations boundaries.
A documentary that shows nude boobs can’t be uploaded by our state television to YouTube because Google forbids that.
Such a documentary DEFINITELY doesn’t belong on LiveLeak or PornHub or whatever either, though. It belongs on a platform like Vimeo or YouTube, where it’s forbidden due to US-American moral standards.
So upload it somewhere else. Google is a private company and as such is perfectly within its rights to allow or not allow activity based on arbitrary rules.
This argument is incoherent so it's not worth a further reply.
It is disingenuous to assume that all societies have the same ultra-liberal, privacy-be-damned, perspective, as appears to be prevalent in the anglo-saxon world, and it is healthy that some democratically elected governments should question Google's hegemony. It certainly doesn't appear to be the case that America's federal administration has anything but sycophantic praise for everything that Silicon Valley does.
France is free to set up their own version of the Great Firewall of China if they want to block Google.com within their borders. That's their recourse; demanding Google censor search results everywhere is not.
France is making a point that there is a legitimate argument to be discussed about things that happen in France not be pushed out to the rest of the planet. They may be wrong, but the debate is worth having. If Google doesn't like it, it is free to quit France, and the french will be free to punish their government for it.
It's silly argument: if you do this for all countries, you'll be left with a tiny intersection of only the content that is not illegal in some form somewhere on earth.
It is indeed a gray area, but what did you expect between the extreme black and white of individual freedom and corporate control/hegemony? Some sort of simple 'bit flip'?
Alas, precisely because the bits are so easily flipped, this discussion must be continued - and it must not be being conducted, so, reactively.
I am an advocate for the right to disappear. I happen to think, having witnessed the bit flip in the positive direction - i.e. mass-surveillance as a consumer - I also wish to remind my peers that it must be recognized that it can .. also .. just as easily be turned off.
In other words, French mores on the issue should infect American mores. It would be good for other cultures, other mores, to not let it go the other way: Total Surveillance as a normative.
In this sense, perhaps yet again, the French lead the way.
You seem to be fine with French law applying to American nationals - what do you think of sharia law applying to French nationals? How about the law-of-the-week declared by some upstart banana republic dictator? Who gets to pull the lever on global law? Where do you, fit2rule, draw the line - is it only France? Only countries where Google has operates? only western democracies? Or does every sovereign get to throw what they deem illegal into the pot?
And yes, I deem sovereign power more important than corporate power. Don't you?
America can do whatever it wants tax-wise to its own citizens. Copyright and bank integration has to do with existing trade agreements that are peer-shared and mutually respected. Russia is free to keep its assets within its own country if it doesn't want to participate in a larger system with shared rules.
The issue here is that France is trying to apply a local law that is not mutually agreed upon with any other country, to other countries. And in doing so is creating bad precedent regarding censorship extended across borders with no recourse. I can't challenge France's law in court as a US citizen, so why should I be denied access to information at their discretion?
That is what is happening in all of my points, including (the relatively minor) point a). Recall that it is not obvious that revenue earned in a country that is not America should be taxed by America.
More generally, someone democratic needs to challenge America once in a while, arguably for America's own health.
Here, your argument is even weaker because it is essentially "we give america power, and they use it".
The dollar's dominance is not america's fault, it's literally everyone else's :)
America has not militarily imposed it's will on france or any other european nation that i'm aware of in the recent past so i'm not sure you can really claim america forcing y'all to their point of view on that one.
If you think for a second that any country that has power will not use it against other countries in trade negotiations, that just seems ultra-naive to me.
"Recall that it is not obvious that revenue earned in a country that is not America should be taxed by America."
Hey, remember that time when france tried to tax all the Google revenue not earned in france by claiming google ireland has a permanent establishment in france (and then claims google owes it a billion in tax when the max google possibly earned was a total of 237 million in google france?)?
No worries though, i'm sure, unlike every other country, france wouldn't try to use it's power to force any other country or multi-national corporation to do anything. They'll only do the right thing.
I think this is a bit of hyperbole.
Past that, can you point to a time in history when a utopic state of happiness and rightness ruled (IE you got what you wanted) and the world still functioned?
The argument that France appears to be making in this case is that it doesn't need other countries to agree to its demands, its courts have jurisdiction everywhere.
I feel the difference is straightforward. The US has an interest in its world view and values being shared by the rest of the world and uses its economic power to get other countries to agree, at least in part, to enforcing that world view and values. They are not however (in general), asserting that decisions made in the US apply in other countries (except to our own citizens, wherein enforcement of the local US law is still at the discretion of the foreign nations while our citizens are within their borders).
If the US were to assert global jurisdiction for a decision made in a local (i.e., state or federal) court it would be equally unfounded. If, however, they were to negotiate with another country and use our economic advantage to get them to agree to enforcement of a particular policy, then the country has presumably weighed the pros and cons of that decision and decided it was worth the compromise. You don't have to like it, but if you skip the middle step sovereignty as a nation becomes meaningless.
Just like people agree to pay the mob protection money.
I mean, countries could refuse to go along with things like FATCA. It would be an enconomic disaster for them when the US freezes them out, but they could do it.
b and c are examples of mutually-agreed treaties/agreements. If france didn't want to do it, it shouldnt' have signed the treaties :)
d was a mostly-coalition force AFAIK (not my area of expertise), but let me just suggest that rules of starting/fighting wars is not quite the same as the right to be forgotten, and that this doesn't belong as an example because basically every country can be accused of starting wars to impose it's will unilaterally somewhere else. That's what war is :)
The limitations are severe: Since living in the US I am not allowed to hold certain financial products that I owned when living in Germany, since compliance with US law would be to costly for German institutions. In particular, citing wikipedia [1], "It requires non-US (foreign) financial institutions, such as banks, to enter into an agreement with the IRS to search through their customer databases to identify those customers suspected of being U.S. persons and to disclose the account holders' names, TINs, addresses, and the transactions of most types of accounts."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
Many more examples can be provided.
By that same measure it would be undemocratic to enforce French laws on non-French citizens who weren't able to participate in the elections of the representative who enacted them. Whatever chip on your shoulder you have about American companies or the actions of the American government do not change this fact.
The general mold (which AFAIK is quite similar across the EEC area, somewhat independent of the formation of the EEC/EU) -- is that a user has a right to a) make any (personal/sensitive) information stored is correct, and b) as an extension of various common legal principles one have the right to a new life after being acquitted, and after serving out a sentence.
Just those two things imply a need for a global accord on how data should be handled, indexed etc. The current RTBF framework is probably not the best approach -- but I think it misses the mark to simply equate it with censorship. Controlling information is of course technically censorship -- but there's a difference between having a legal recourse against defamation -- and erasing Tiananmen Square from history.
I do think we are right to be worried about the actual results of any legislation though.
If it wasn't so unlikely to actually get anywhere, one might want the UN, or the Haag to set up some form of accord -- as right to privacy, and right to manage information in digital archives (which are much more versatile, accessible, trivial to copy and linkable than traditional paper archives) have some definite overlap with human rights.
This isn't some insurmountable task; there appears to be wide co-operation on other kinds of data, such as child porn already -- even if the age of consent is very different in the (all of?) the US and much of Euorope.
As for an example revenge porn, false public accusation or protection of witness are more in the spectrum of RTBF law than chinese-like censorship mentionned by Google. And correct me if I'm wrong but french RTBF apply only to individuals, so how could they even compare this with state censorsphip?
The bit where the state says they'll punish you if you don't comply---if you don't stop talking about the things they want kept quiet? That's state censorship. What else could it be?
It sounds like a end run around press freedom to me.
But again its strange because Google dont say they won't apply RTBF, they just say they will apply it on a per country basis... But from a technical standpoint this is even more complicated... So they basically say "we Google define the law" for everything that is "out" of your country.
Yet good luck to them defining what "out your country mean" in a global network.
I thought 'Right to be forgotten' was something organisation like EFF stand for.
(IE either we should give up an curtail press freedoms, or we should accept that society needs to be more accepting of reality. This intermediate state where we curtail the freedom of certain actors, but have decided another set get a pass, is what the EFF is complaining about)
As a citizen I would fell better knowing that a Law define what can and cannot be erase instead of bargaining on the promise of a Big Company : "Don't be evil"
An ideal solution would be that an international treaty globaly redefine for the best all the laws about copyright which are all utterly outdated and inappropriate for digital media.
(RTBF is as far I know is in France either a part or an extension of copyrights laws)
Because the EU and france forced google to control it. They didn't want to control it at all. They tried desperately not to. They wanted the source of these stories to be responsible for what they publish, and be forced to update or remove the stories.
Which seems much saner to me.
But excuse me if I prefer DuckDuckGo over Google on that matter :P
It's a problem of balancing privacy rights and press rights.
Yet the main method is to try to control secondary indexing instead of primary distribution?
If the published media has a negative effect on their life, why aren't they making the published media go away?
"Targeting the companies indexing the information is probably a more tractable problem then tracking down and eliminating all the sources."
I don't buy this. All of these sources need a way to print retractions/etc in these countries due to the way libel/etc laws work. So they already must have mechanisms to achieve this.
This is like targeting library card catalogs for indexing microfiche.
I don't think that's the reason:
> In 1995 the European Union adopted the European Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46EC) to regulate the processing of personal data.[9] This is now considered a component of human rights law.[10] The new European Proposal for General Data Protection Regulation provides protection and exemption for companies listed as “media” companies, like newspapers and other journalistic work. However, Google purposely opted out of being classified as a “media” company and so is not protected. Judges in the European Union ruled that because the international corporation, Google, is a collector and processor of data it should be classified as a “data controller” under the meaning of the EU data protection directive. These “data controllers” are required under EU law to remove data that is “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant, ” - making this directive of global importance
Yes, it is just for "citizens".
http://www.cnil.fr/linstitution/missions/proteger/
And you're right, it's not related to censorsphip at all.
It is probably a strategy from Google's lawyers to turn that in something against the "liberty". A sophism.
Censorship: the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts.
Isn't the suppression of "unacceptable" information the stated goal of the right to be forgotten?
News organizations can still publish articles about someone who invoked the RTBF, but nobody will read it because it's impossible to find.
In the bureaucratically definitive sense it's technically not censorship, it's just using a characteristic of the internet to make it censorship. At least, that's the writing on the wall.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/14/google-acc...
"Seeking to balance the right to clarify the record and the right to freedom of expression, the [highest Constitutional Court in Colombia] held that the newspaper was not required to remove the article. The court did require the newspaper to update the published information and use “robots.txt” and “metatags” to prevent the indexing of the content by Google due to the particularly serious nature of the crime and the severe personal consequences for Gloria."
Columbia - University in NYC Colombia - Country in South America
I make so many spelling mistakes I hate to correct, but when I ready your first sentence I thought you might have meant the university.
I've been living in Bogotá for a few months and I only realised I was spelling Colombia wrong a couple of months in - pretty embarrassing.
I now notice many if not most of my English-speaking friends make the same mistake when emailing/facebooking/whatsapping me and I try to correct them as I go.
It appears Columbia is a reflex spelling of the sound of the word - I'm from the UK so haven't had that much exposure to the use of the word for the NY University, so I don't think that's the explanation in my case.
Someone should make a website for this along the lines of amispellingcolumbiacorrectly.com -> NO to spread the word ;-)
(The reflex spelling probably comes from the fact that most English speakers are primarily familiar with the English spelling of Christopher Columbus)
I meant correct in the context of trying to spell Colombia, the country name, given that's what I was talking about - obviously the spelling Columbia is correct if you're referring to anything else which actually goes by that spelling..
Currently a French citizen can have content from any website delisted, no matter where it's hosted, from google.fr.
A website that fulfills a search query by searching google.com, then searching google.fr, then searching google.cn. It shows the results to the google.com query but gives badges to results based on which governments appear to be censoring them.
Ip geolocating can work to identify if someone lives in france. Client living in France => serve content based on french laws.
They could comply and say to he cnil "if vpn is bothering you, then you should regulate vpn use".
EDIT: I wonder how it works for drugs for example: if someone sells drugs from a country where it's legal to France, could he be found guilty in France? (I am pretty sure the smuggler/dealer will ^^)
"I recognize that the Council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid ass decision, I have elected to ignore it."
What works is google.com/ncr or just use duckduckgo.
Quite a few of his stories have been made into movies with Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") probably the best adaptation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick_bibliography#Fi...
And that was a full-length novel, later turned into a major motion picture, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Edit: it was adapted into that movie, then novelized afterward?
Edit2: http://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Piers-Anthony/dp/03807087...
Edit: yes, apparently: "In 1966, the late Philip K. Dick published the novelette "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale." A movie based on the story will be released next year; this book is a novelization of the script and the original novel" -- http://www.amazon.com/Total-Recall-Piers-Anthony/dp/06880520...
Block a new ip address every 3-8 hours depending on what os is backing things?
Well, duh! Governments WANT this.
If you only want to be subject to the authority of one jurisdiction, make sure your company doesn't have a presence anywhere else. That's not a guarantee, but it helps a lot.
One can debate the merits of the law all day long, but in the end all that matters is that a national government is sovereign within their own territory. If they want you to do something that you don't want to do, you can remove yourself from their jurisdiction, change their mind somehow, or do it anyway.
Even with super helpful full disclosure, it could take years just to find the legal entity they're interested in fining.
But nobody wants that. it's stupid.
I kinda sorta see the point about people in .fr can see stuff via .com that the government doesn't want them to see, but it sure seems like trying to legislate no rain on saturday.
Google is carefully taking a stand here.
Google is not the Internet. They are a multinational company who store search results in a series of databases created and managed by people. Those results can be changed if Google wants to do business in France and quite likely the EU if it all starts to escalate.
And I'll let you in on a secret. European startups would be more than happy to build the next Google.
That it's a red herring to the EU's greater trade regulatory problems?
Very, very cynical - and Google have lost yet another point in their race to dominate culture as a corporate, global power..
Just to be clear, the argument here is that censoring Google is an act of aggression against Google and all of its users regardless of what is being censored. So forcing Google to censor illegal material would be beholden to this argument as well?
Google has the right to spread whatever it wants as long as it is not aggressing against other people in doing it.
Again this is is just cynical flaunting of sovereignty on Googles' part, and another example of a supra-national entity lauding its power over democratic governments.
As a business grows larger and sets up multiple offices in many countries, this can make things quite complex.
Now, as to the original point, Google is required by many nations to censor certain material regardless of if that information only is kept in servers in some other country. Are these laws an act of aggression against Google? (Ignore for a second that Google would likely choose to censor most of that material anyways due to the negative publicity in not doing so, similar to reddit's banning of borderline legal subreddits not because the law, as they were borderline legal, but due to publicity.)
Do you have a cite for that please?
As I understand it the "sex tourism" laws cover behaviour that is not legal in the US, but is legal in some other country. If a US citizen travels to that other country they're still breaking US law, even though they're not in the US and even though that activity is legal in the country they're visiting.
Also, for some activities, the travelling US citizen will face justice in the US for some crimes no matter what the legal status of that activity is.
Well, in the best example, it is a bit complicated. Take age of consent. Within a state, state law rules. Between states, federal law rules. In most cases, federal law is stricter than state law. So it would be an action that would be legal in the state you were a resident of, but not in another state.
Also a counter example. Prostitution is illegal in most states, but it is, to a limited extent, legal for an American to engage in such abroad (much like it is legal for residents of Texas to go to Nevada).
In short, I believe there are laws that do what I describe and laws that do what you describe.
(Note I'm not a lawyer and the laws have changed a bit since I last read them.)
Note that it should not take many bits to profile us in a way that is useful, while still respecting our privacy. For example, with about 33 bits of information, one can identify any individual on this planet. With less than this amount, one can still put you in a class of individuals, such that you get relevant search results.