Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios.
[…]In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google’s global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission’s new Disinformation Code of Practice “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services” and said Google won’t commit to it.
↫ Sara Fischer at Axios
Imagine if any one of us, ordinary folk told the authorities we were just not going to follow the law. We’re not going to pay our taxes because tax law “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’re not going to follow traffic laws and regulations because doing so “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’re not going to respect property laws because doing so “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services”. We’d be in trouble within a heartbeat. We’d be buried in fines, court cases, and eventually, crippling debt, bankruptcy, and most likely end up in prison.
The arrogance with which these American tech giants willfully declare themselves to be above EU laws and regulations is appalling, and really should have far more consequences than it does right now. Executives should be charged and arrested, products and services banned and taken off the shelves, and eventually, the companies themselves should be banned from operating within the EU altogether. Especially with the incoming regime in the US, which will most likely grant the tech giants even more freedom to do as they please, the EU needs to start standing up against this sort of gross disrespect.
The consequences for a corporation knowingly breaking the law should be just as grave as for an individual citizen knowingly breaking the law.
At this point, US and EU regulations for online services have diverged so much that the internet will eventually diverge into two versions: Worldwide (following US regulations) and EU You can already see this with some websites refusing to serve IP addresses from the EU.
And the sad thing is I would probably prefer the Worldwide version of the internet. I mean, the EU thinks it can tell search engines how to rank results? Are they also going to give Google a source code of the search engine they should use and tell them to compile it and run it? That’s the only way to make sure they are downvoting “misinformation” properly, after all…
Fortunately I already have a VPN for torrenting my uhm…. Linux ISOs without having my real IP harversted, so I can get a US IP address anytime I want.
kurkosdr,
Outsiders are probably not aware of this, but geofencing is increasingly being deployed to limit access to porn sites in the US right now. Conservative groups, including the one behind project 2025 have the explicit goal of making pornography illegal. However since their legal challenges against adult content creators haven’t succeeded, they’ve embraced a new tactic that seems to be paying off: pass legislative restrictions on adult websites around child protection. One third of US states now require adult websites to have users authenticate themselves with government ID.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/13210373/map-reveals-third-of-us-has-porn-bans/
Many US porn sites including pornhub obviously favor technical solutions that don’t invade people’s privacy and do not collect government IDs for access, but the result is that many adult sites are inaccessible in these states without a VPN.
So when you say “the internet will eventually diverge into two versions: Worldwide (following US regulations) and EU”, I think this underestimates the state of fragmentation and the number of legislators who have an interest in using their legal authority to meddle with the internet. This is only the beginning.
Nobody cares about porn. In the UK, that legislation exists for years and you probably haven’t even heard about it.
a_very_dumb_nickname,
I don’t believe it for a second… but I can agree if I reinterpret that to mean that nobody wants to be seen as caring because it’s taboo and could put them out of a job, especially in politics.
I agree there are many jurisdictions with content restrictions I was just responding to point out that the US isn’t a counterexample to internet fragmentation.
kurkosdr,
With all due respect, I think you are missing the point.
Ad “[…] the EU thinks it can tell search engines how to rank results?”:
This is about fact-checking. The EU is demanding that Google check facts prior to release and demand that Google be responsible for the information they disseminate, just like other media. These tech companies can not maintain their position of merely being the disinterested carriers of mail, not responsible for the contents of the envelopes, while skewing results to maximize earnings. It is hardly a secret that rankings are not objective, which is what the EU is calling Google out for.
ad “Are they also going to give Google a source code of the search engine they should use and tell them to compile it and run it?”:
This is strawman argumentation. The fact is that there are laws in the EU, and like all other companies doing business in the Eurozone, Google must abide by those laws. For Google to highhandedly declare that this “simply isn’t appropriate or effective for our services” says something about the political clout of the tech companies in the US. Google is basically saying that this will cost them money, so go f*k yourselves.
Fact-checking is a scam. It’s been proven than these fact-checkers are politically motivated and flag correct information as false because of political bias.
jgfenix,
The problem isn’t so much that fact checking is a scam, but that we’ve got extremist political parties where the modus operandi is strait up lying and are willing and able to use the powers of the government vengefully. It’s doubleplusgood.
“Imagine if any one of us, ordinary folk told the authorities we were just not going to follow the law.”
Depending on the law, you will face the consequences. As will Google.
In both cases these consequences can take quite some time, leading to law suites and revisions of these law suites and so on, until some final instance will decide if the law was constitutional or not …
“The arrogance with which these American tech giants willfully declare themselves to be above EU laws”
I would say the arrogance here is on the side of unelected EU bureaucrats, a rather doubtfully democratic European Commission and the lack of respect for the freedom of speech as a human right.
So I am applauding the showdown that is coming now. Google won’t be the only one. X and Facebook will do the same.
And the outcome will decide if we in Europe still live in a free society or if we are in really just as autocratic as China.
Thom Holwerda,
Large corporations get away with stuff that individuals and even small businesses couldn’t get away with. We shouldn’t tolerate this.
With that said though, the government getting too handsy with business operations also makes me uncomfortable. I am in favor of government intervening against egregious policies that harm our interests as consumers including privacy and unfair terms of service. They play an important role in empowering consumers to fight back. But I don’t like the idea of government becoming the arbiter of information…this is too Orwellian and autocratic for me and it worries me when governments feel entitled to regulate us rather than represent us. Even if we assume the current government is well intentioned, the next one may not be and I think these are powers the government shouldn’t have if we don’t want to turn into China.
The key difference here is that to American tech companies, EU law is *foreign law*. Risk calculus changes completely when you’re dealing with foreign law. How many Chinese or Turkemenistani laws have you broken this morning? You don’t know and you don’t care, because you accurately assess the risk calculus and conclude that you’re reasonably unlikely to be kidnapped to a foreign country to account for your crimes there (though that *has* happened).
One could argue that when doing business in a country, a company should follow its laws (though I note how inconsistently applied this tends to be – the same people who demand that Google comply with European law also often demand that Google fail to comply with Chinese law). But in reality, there’s a risk calculus at work here. What are the consequences of non-compliance? What counts as ‘doing business there’? If Google, Facebook, etc chose to shutter their European offices and ignore European law, it’s far from clear what the EU could do to them exactly. Block them, maybe? This would run into a lot of resistance within Europe itself.
Google, Facebook etc. are unlikely to do this, of course, because it’s much cheaper just to buy (‘lobby’) European politicians or assert pressure through the new US administration.
Cal,
Google does have a presence in the EU so they are subject to EU laws. EU have no jurisdiction over outsiders though (despite EU laws like GDPR pretending they do).
I think these companies stand to loose a lot of advertising business (ie billions) if they were to exit europe, but hypothetically there’s not much EU could do about it. As far as I know they don’t currently have the technology in place to censor the web by force.
Google can still, for example, severely restrict YouTube in the EU and save its entire business if that’s what the EU wants.
> Google does have a presence in the EU so they are subject to EU laws. EU have no jurisdiction over outsiders though (despite EU laws like GDPR pretending they do).
Of course, that’s why I posed the hypothetical of them closing their offices.
> I think these companies stand to loose a lot of advertising business (ie billions) if they were to exit europe, but hypothetically there’s not much EU could do about it.
I’m sure it’s currently worth more to them to stay than leave, but the EU is not a be-all-and-end-all market for US tech. Apple’s court filings revealed that the EU only accounts 7% of App Store revenue, for example. If US tech keeps getting slapped with massive fines or regulations that they perceive to be striking at the core of their business model (rightly or wrongly), at some point it’ll cease to be economically rational to keep those EU offices open.
I think it’s much more likely that they’ll just successfully pressure the EU to back off though.
It’s Turkmen, not Turkmenestani 🙂
It’s not just about closing an office in Dublin and not having Irish ale at the pub down the street. Google will be banned from collecting any money from anyone (or anything) in the EU. Try selling Google One to EU consumers or Google Workspace to Volkswagen after such a ban.
It would hurt. EU is a tad bigger market than Turkmenistan after all.
Still, I don’t understand how google is expected to fact check every google video or search result. Is it a feasible expectation?
Turkmen is the ethnicity, Turkmenistani is the nationality.
> Google will be banned from collecting any money from anyone (or anything) in the EU
And this will be enforced… how? The only realistic way this can be enforced is to somehow criminalise EU entities purchasing Google products, because in such a scenario they’d be the only ones that EU law can actually be enforced on. (And this presumably wouldn’t cover anyone using free Google services, like search or YouTube.) If Google simply serves their payment page from US servers, and processes payments via US banks, there’s not much the EU can do.
> And this will be enforced… how?
Just stop the EU entities writing off google apps payments as expenses, and you’ll see how.
Such a law is a violation of free speech. Compelled speech (ie. forcing a person or a company to say something by law) is as much a violation of free speech as censorship. The government forcing publishers to print messages approved by the government itself should scare you. That’s one of the hallmarks of totalitarianism, and it’s fundamentally against freedom and rights to free speech, free expression and freedom of the press.
It’s great to see that at least one company is willing to oppose this kind of tyranny, so I consider that good news.
Honestly, I find it appalling how some people willingly want the government controlling what publishers publish on their platforms, and forcing them to publish government-approved messages. That’s some scary s**t right there. How can you ever support such a thing? It’s supporting totalitarianism. It’s supporting tyranny. It’s supporting government-imposed propaganda. It’s against the most fundamental principles of freedom.
Ascribing corporations human rights (i.e. free speech) is a neoliberal American invention. Not everyone agrees with it.
I’m disappointed to say so but this blog post is misinformation by itself.
This is not EU law. This is a set of voluntary measures that companies may commit to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_Code_of_Practice_on_Disinformation
Google has committed to them in 2018, but now appears to be backtracking.
Thank you! It’s both sad and ironic to see how quickly all the other commentators here took this piece of misinformation at face value. Quite a lesson in itself, isn’t it?
From the link in the citation: “It is for the signatories to decide which commitments they sign up to and it is their responsibility to ensure the effectiveness of their commitments’ implementation. The Code is not endorsed by the Commission”.
Of course it’s much more fulfilling to ramble about “breaking the law” vs. “tyranny”.
Everyone about to either be emboldened (like Google) or running scared (like the EU) from Trump and Co.
Google, like any of us, can choose to ignore the law. And like us, Google will have to accept the repercussions of that decision.
Very good. If we can’t get our sh*t together, the Americans forcing us to do so is the 2nd best case.
Let’s see DSA, GDPR and AI act all burn in flames. Will be glorious.