Web Privacy Laws Not Good News For Google In Europe

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Google is facing turmoil in Europe with the European Union slamming antitrust investigation on the company. The new law would have greater repercussions as the French lawmakers have called to restrict the search results to comply with “right to be forgotten” in their privacy laws. Google’s business model is designed on a search engine, and it could be a greater issue for the company. Meanwhile, it can turn out to be a bigger issue for the internet users as well. The question that arises is if the Europeans can hold the key to what people around the world see on the internet, the same can be followed by other countries too.

The latest on the privacy laws will be a big fallout on the high court ruling giving people the right to remove their personal search results including news article links. Now those who have contacts in the Europe can request Google to remove their search results and relevant links. In this connect Google responded that visitors are going to google. de and google.fr cannot view the restricted results while on google.com still. Moreover, Europeans can now navigate to non-European version. The French law makers fined the company for not taking sufficient steps in this direction.

google11Europeans when they type google.com, it takes them to their local version of Google service used by 95% of the European users. But the problem is Google has not taken enough steps to prevent people from going to google.com. In response to the regulators, the company will take action using geo-blocking to control European users. Now Google will take steps to remove links on Google.fr blocking users in France seeing the restricted links on Google sites in other countries. Virtual private network tools have to be installed to camouflage their locations. This can show pruned results in the search engine.

The best solution would be to prevent a global deletion, facilitating the sovereignty of the state to enforce their laws within their territory. This is a far call from the promise of universal accessibility of information and a step in the direction to splinternets. The problems are numerous as banning parts of the information on the web can create barriers for those browsers. Smaller service providers will not be able to build customized French versions like how Google has exercised. The easiest way would be to block the French users, but again this could mean that the world would miss out the French marketplace. At the same time, French internet subscribers will miss out on the global Internet.

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