Google may be forced to 'censor' the internet if a court refuses to overturn a ruling

A 'devastating' result on the internet! That is how Google described the consequences that might follow if the Australian court ruling from 2020 holding Google responsible for displaying hyperlinks to pages with defamatory material is not overturned (via The Guardian).

Last year, Google won the right to challenge a defamation lawsuit from 2020 in which the judge ruled in favor of George Defteros, a Victoria state lawyer, and mandated Google to pay Defteros $40,000 in defamation damages. Now in a filing to the High Court of Australia, Google said that if the court doesn't overturn the ruling, Google will be held accountable as the publisher of any material published on the internet to which its search results provide a link.

Google stated that 'a hyperlink is not, in and of itself, the communication of that to which it links.' The search giant also said that if the ruling is not overturned, it will be required to 'censor' its search results even when the censored webpages are coming from reputable sources and may be a 'matter of legitimate interest' to many of the people who search for them.

In 2016, George Defteros asked Google to remove from its search results a 2004 article from an Australian newspaper called The Age. According to Defteros, the article was defaming him. The article reported that Defteros was charged with murder in connection with the deaths of three men. Google refused to remove the article even though the charges were dismissed in 2005. For the tech giant, the article was coming from a reputable source.

In 2020, the judge from the Victorian supreme court ruled that the article from The Age defamed Defteros and rejected Google's request to overturn the ruling. According to the judge, neither the article nor the Google search result showed that the charges against Defteros had been dropped.