Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Facebook, Google, and Twitter—Oral evidence (QQ 1384–1455)
content. I am not aware of our having a Syrian court order. I do not think they tend to do
things in that way.
Q1408 Martin Horwood: You did something comparable in China, didn’t you?
DJ Collins: I am very happy to give a brief explanation of China because it is slightly
different to banning people from making a search. To go back a little, in 2006 as a company
we decided to launch something called Google.cn, which was our Chinese search service.
As part of doing that, we obviously had to comply with Chinese law, some of that was
around self-censorship. It is not a question of banning somebody from making a search but
what information you can serve back to the query that they are making. History has moved
on immensely since 2006. In January 2010 we announced very publicly that we were no
longer prepared to do that given a number of incidents and the fact that the internet
restrictions in China had significantly increased. We no longer operate that. If you do a
search in China on Google.cn, the query is served from Hong Kong.
Q1409 Baroness Corston: Max Mosley told us that he and his legal
representatives had a very high-level meeting with Google in which he said: “Here are the
pictures. We know which ones they are. Simply programme your search engine so they
don’t appear.” His evidence continued: “That is demonstrably technically feasible. They
refused to do it as a matter of principle.” If that is true, which principle is being breached?
Daphne Keller: There are a couple of principles. To go back to the fundamentals,
we are not the publishers of this content; it is put up on third-party sites and we do not
control them. One of the important principles for us is to avoid over-filtering and the
potential harm from mis-identifying perfectly lawful information. As I said before, this is not
something that is built, this is not something that exists and one could throw a switch.
If I could pull back to the larger regulatory framework here, Google and hosting
services, such as the other witnesses here, operate under the E-Commerce Directive and
under the implementing legislation in the UK. That set up a notice and take-down regime.
There was a case from the European Court of Justice, the Scarlet v SABAM case on precisely
this question: should proactive monitoring be required, assuming it is possible, under the E-
Commerce Directive? The court said no, and in that case the attempt under the E-
Commerce Directive to make an intermediary proactively monitor not only raised serious
policy issues about access to information and free speech but also was not consistent with
the letter of the Directive.
Q1410 Baroness Corston: If, as Max Mosley said, the content had already been
ruled by a court of law to be illegally obtained, I do not understand which principle you are
addressing.
Daphne Keller: To reiterate, we have taken down hundreds of URLs in that case.
Q1411 Mr Bradshaw: But at his request; he has to request every single one, and
you have the ability to do it yourselves.
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