According to the latest report, the Supreme Court of Australia overturned the Google website to provide a link to a controversial newspaper article that is suspected of defamation ruling. A seven-judge Australian High Court panel voted 5-2 to overturn an earlier ruling that the Alphabet unit acted as a “library” after publishing the controversial article. The court said the site was not playing an active role.
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The new ruling brings new confusion to a question Australia has pondered for years: Where lies the responsibility for online defamation? Should big platforms like Google and Meta-owned Facebook be held responsible, for the country’s years-long defamation laws the review has yet to make a final recommendation.
According to the published verdict, the case stemmed from a 2004 article in which a criminal defense attorney crossed professional boundaries and became a “close friend” to a criminal. The lawyer, George Defteros, found a link to the story when he Googled his name in 2016 and deleted it after 150 people viewed it, the judgment said.
Defteros filed suit in a state court, which later found Google was a publisher and ordered it to pay the lawyer A$40,000 ($28,056). Google appealed the decision. “The article was not written by any employee or agent of Appellant,” the two jury judges wrote in Wednesday’s ruling. The appellant, in this case, is Google.
“The article was written by a journalist, not affiliated with the appellant in any way, and published by an independent newspaper over which the appellant has no control or influence.”
