Google was dragged over the coals by a British parliamentary committee on Monday afternoon, as the technology company’s approach to removing illegal content from its search results again came under scrutiny.
Several members of the joint committee on privacy and injunctions, chaired by John Whittingdale MP, repeatedly attacked Google’s representatives as they set out how the search engine seeks to balance legal challenges with freedom of expression.
Ben Bradshaw, who was culture minister during 2010’s passage of the controversial Digital Economy Act, Nadim Zahawi, the former chief executive of internet pollster YouGov, and Lord Mawhinney, who was transport secretary and Conservative party chairman in the 1990s, all criticised Google for what they saw as its failure to help victims of invasion of privacy, by removing all links to content which a judge has ruled to be illegal in the UK.
The most famous example is Max Mosley, who won a landmark privacy case against the News of the World newspaper, but is now suing Google in the UK, France and Germany over what the former Formula One head called its “intransigent” refusal to remove material about his sex life from its search results.
Daphne Keller, associate general counsel at Google, argued that the search engine was not the publisher of images from a video of Mr Mosley’s “party” which were first published by the NotW and can still be found online.
“We don’t control them,” she said of the websites indexed by Google. “An important principle for us is to avoid over-filtering and misidentifying perfectly lawful information.”
Committee members questioned why Google cannot “find and destroy” all instances of Mr Mosley’s video, given it has been able to remove many images of child abuse and was, between 2006 and 2010, able to censor search results in China. They accused it of having the “technical ability but not the will” to comply with court rulings.
Google has taken down “hundreds” of links to the images in question at Mr Mosley’s request, Ms Keller said. Google cannot “throw a switch” to make them all instantly disappear from the web, she said, because a computer programme could never judge the content or context of online material as well as a human being.
“We are not the internet,” added DJ Collins, Google’s vice president for global policy and communications. “I’m sure nobody is suggesting that the model we have in the UK should be akin to the model we had in China… The bottom line is we comply with the law in this country.”
But Mr Bradshaw said their answers were “totally unconvincing” while Lord Mawhinney said Ms Keller was “extremely hard to pin down” and had “ducking and diving down to a fine art”.
Ms Keller challenged his interpretation of her arguments, saying: “I don’t dispute that someone could build this thing. My policy point is I think doing so is a bad idea.”
The Googlers’ appearance, alongside representatives from Facebook and Twitter, follows last week’s session on internet companies at the Leveson inquiry into press standards.
It comes at a time of greater regulatory focus on internet companies’ responsibility for monitoring the content they carry, with Twitter introducing a new facility to remove tweets in particular countries and fierce debate in Washington about how to reduce copyright infringement online.
Not all of the select committee’s members agreed with the criticism of Google.
In a posting to Twitter shortly after the session ended, Martin Horwood, committee member and Liberal Democrat MP, wrote: “Embarrassing rudeness to Google, Twitter & [Facebook] and ignorance about internet from my ‘colleagues’ on joint privacy & injunctions [committee] today.”
