Canadian Court Forces Google to Take One Step Closer to Internet Censorship

Only the Supreme Court of Canada can save Google now

A dangerous precedent has been set in Canada where a court rejected Google's appeal in a case the company has been fighting for years, and now the it has to remove links to particular pages from its world-wide search results.

In what RIAA and MPAA have been trying to achieve by throwing all kinds of ridiculous lawsuits at the company, and even attempting to push SOPA past the US government, two silly Canadian companies have accomplished in a squabble totally unrelated to piracy or online censorship.

A case of trademark violation is at the core of the issue, kind of

The whole affair started when Morgan Jack, a former business partner of Equustek Solutions, set up Datalink Technologies Gateways and began reselling Equustek networking routers, relabeling them under his own brand.

Equustek sued Datalink, won, but wasn't satisfied. It then sued Google and wanted all links leading to the Datalink website removed from the company's search results.

Google complied and removed the links in question, yet only from its Canadian .ca extension. Equustek was not happy, sued again and in 2014 won and got a court to force Google to remove the links in question from all of its domains.

Google appealed, but this Friday, the company lost the appeal and is now facing one final solution before having to comply with the court's ruling, and that's the Supreme Court of Canada.

Google, if left alone, will lose the fight against censorship

If Google doesn't win, this will set a legal precedent for other business, and all type of business can sue the company in any Canadian court and have it remove all the links they want wiped off the Internet.

This, of course, includes RIAA and MPAA, which for years have been wanting to remove pirate sites from search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo, but have never gotten even remotely close to what these two Canadian manufacturers of networking equipment have managed to do.

Google had a terrible week, being also cited by the French agency CNIL in a similar matter, regarding the way it implements the Right to Be Forgotten law (RTBFL) in the EU.

Apparently the French aren't happy with Google because the company is removing links that come under RTBFL only from its .fr domain, and not from results that appear on all of its other extensions. Officially, CNIL has notified Google it has 15 days to remove the URLs world-wide, or it will be sanctioned according to French law.

Update: The EFF has a copy of the appeals court's decision, if you want to read it.