Google forced to e-forget a company worldwide by Lisa Vaas.
From the post:
Forcing Google to develop amnesia is turning out to be contagious.
Likely inspired by Europeans winning the right to be forgotten in Google search results last month, a Canadian court has ruled that Google has to remove search results for a Canadian company’s competitor, not just in Canada but around the world.
The Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled on 13 June that Google had two weeks to forget the websites of a handful of companies with “Datalink” in their names.
…
I didn’t know I was being prescient in Feathers, Gossip and the European Union Court of Justice (ECJ) when I said:
Even if Google, removes all of its references from a particular source, the information could be re-indexed in the future from new sources.
That is precisely the issue in the Canadian case. Google removes specific URLs only to have different URLs for the same company appear in their search results.
The tenor of the decision is best captured by:
The Court must adapt to the reality of e-commerce with its potential for abuse by those who would take the property of others and sell it through the borderless electronic web of the internet. I conclude that an interim injunction should be granted compelling Google to block the defendants’ websites from Google’s search results worldwide. That order is necessary to preserve the Court’s process and to ensure that the defendants cannot continue to flout the Court’s orders. [159]
What you won’t find in the decision is any mention of the plaintiffs tracking down the funds from e-commerce sites alleged to be selling the product in question. Odd isn’t it? The plaintiffs are concerned about enjoined sales but make no effort to recover funds from those sales?
Of course, allowing a Canadian court (or any court) to press-gang anyone at hand to help enforce its order is very attractive, to courts at least. Should not be so attractive to anyone concerned with robust e-commerce.
If enjoined sales were occurring, there may have been evidence on sales but the court fails to mention it, plaintiffs had more than enough remedies to pursue those transactions.
Instead, with the aid of a local court, the plaintiffs are forcing Google to act as its unpaid worldwide e-commerce assassin.
More convenient for the local plaintiff but a bad news for global e-commerce.
PS: I don’t suppose anyone will be registering new websites with the name “Datalink” in them just to highlight the absurdity of this decision.