Web Search Engines Ordered to De-Index Hundreds of Sites
December 5, 2011
Interesting action: Law & Disorder reports, “US judge orders hundreds of sites ‘de-indexed’ from Google, Facebook.” And Twitter, and Google+, and Bing, and Yahoo. . . . Why, you ask? For allegedly selling counterfeit Chanel goods.
Chanel, you see, took to the courts in Nevada to go after sites is says were selling knockoffs. The fashion powerhouse’s own people reviewed deliveries and Web sites and testified that the goods were fake. That convinced Judge Kent Dawson, who ordered those site names seized and redirected to a page with a notice of the seizure. He also ordered a total ban on search engine indexing of the sites.
The article asserts:
Missing from the ruling is any discussion of the Internet’s global nature; the judge shows no awareness that the domains in question might not even be registered in this country, for instance, and his ban on search engine and social media indexing apparently extends to the entire world. (And, when applied to US-based companies like Twitter, apparently compels them to censor the links globally rather than only when accessed by people in the US.)
Can he do that? Apparently.
Writer Nate Anderson points out that actions like this may render the whole debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act moot. Similar cases are proceeding apace in other courts, and companies may win control over the Internet that way. Our view is that once content is not listed in a public search system, the content and the Web site to which links point cease to exist. Certain governments remove content from their servers too. What’s this mean to a researcher? If you don’t know what you don’t know, you are informed. How’s that for a way to sharpen the intellectual spikes, gentle reader? Could some banned sites create a different, non-public network? If a search fails in an index, does the content exist? I suppose it depends on which index one searches.
Cynthia Murrell, December 05, 2011
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