Here’s something to make you think, and maybe laugh. First off read the story on this page: http://deanhunt.com/bizzare-google-request/. Don’t forget to come back when you’re finished and read on for whatithink!
Basically, if you search for a specific item on Google, it will rank deanhunt.com before an online shop that sells the said item. At the time of writing neither the serach term or the online store have been named. Now the owner of this shop wants to sue Mr Hunt because of the way Google ranks his shop compared to Mr Hunts site. Google’s ranking algorithm is obviously not in the control of Mr Hunt, so the general consensus is that the shop-owner has a snowballs chance in hell of getting his way.
While those of us that do not live in America may laugh, and shake our heads at the absurdity of it all, it does raise some interesting questions. What if the shop-owner won his lawsuit? Could the owner of a website be forced to remove their website from Google’s listings just because they were ranked higher than the plaintiffs website? What if the owner of the offending website refused to do so? Could their hosting company be forced to do so? What if the offending website is hosted in a different country than the plaintiffs?
Google, as an American company, is bound by the laws that govern that nation, but should non-American companies or individuals be held subject to the same laws? It is a fact, much lamented by the world at large, that America holds an unfair sway over the Internet. While kudos are due to DARPA for initiating the first “internet”, it has grown far beyond what they ever envisioned for their project – DARPAnet. However the Internet that grew from such inauspicious beginnings is now a truly multinational affair, and the more America tries to cling on to control, the more difficult they will find it to be accepted in the Internet community.
And this brings us back to the nub of the problem. When a judge several thousand miles away can make an order forcing you to change the website that you own or run, then you’re faced with a degradation of the freedom of speech that the current day Internet gives. And if you decide not to comply, then if your hosting company, or their upstream provider have any presence whatsoever in the US, they can be forced to remove access to your site.
And all because a search engine algorithm ranked your site better than a commercial one. Of course, this is merely hypothetical, and while any judge with a shred of common sense and sanity would throw this type of case out, there will come a time when a case along these lines will succeed. And then what will we be left with?
Tags: bizzare, google, Internet, remove, request, search, whatithink