Google warns of the obligation to censor the Internet

Google has warned of a devastating impact on the Internet if a court ruling that the search giant is liable for defamatory material contained in hyperlinked pages is not overturned.

The company warned in a Supreme Court memorandum that it may have to monitor its search results if attorney George Deferos is allowed to seek $40,000 in damages for defamation.

Deferos successfully filed a complaint against Google. He argued that his publication of the search results, which included a 2004 article about his arrest for conspiracy to kill the accused, made him famous.

Supreme Court Justice Melinda Richards ruled in 2020 that the article implied that Defteros had gone from a professional lawyer to a friend and confidant of criminal elements.

The Victorian Court of Appeal rejected a request by Google to overturn the ruling. Defteros' lawyers contacted the search firm in 2016 to request the article's removal. But Google refused on the grounds that the article's source was trustworthy.

Google's lawyers told the Supreme Court that the notice contained false allegations that Deferos had sued the article's source for defamation and that the article's source had agreed to be removed from its website.

Google warned that it could be liable as a publisher for any material published on the Web whose search results provide a hyperlink.
Google warns of devastating impact if court decision is not overturned

The technology company argued that it was not the publisher of the material because the hyperlink does not in itself represent a transfer of what it links to.

Google said websites should be held liable if the hyperlink actually repeats the defamatory assumption it links to.

He also asked the Supreme Court to reconsider the conditional privilege defense. It stated that it believed its users had a legitimate interest in accessing the material.

In 2018, the court gave the green light to the defamation lawsuits against the search engines. Milorad Turkulja sued Google for a series of images and results that he called defamatory.

The Supreme Court ruled in September last year in the Dylan Fuller case that social media users are liable as publishers for defamatory comments by a third party on their social media posts.