UK businessman sues Google over defamatory posts
By John Pospisil
The British owner of domain registrar dotworlds is suing Google for directing web searches to sites defaming him and his company.
A Google search of “dotworlds scam” brings up a number of forum posts that accuse Brian Retkin and his company dotworlds of fraud, and of cashing in on the 9/11 tragedy.
In the US search engines and other third party information services are protected from defamation actions, but in the UK, where Retkin suing Google, the situation is different.
In the UK search engines and other information services can theoretically be sued for defamation, but can’t be sued if they weren’t aware of the defamatory material. However, once a search engine becomes aware of defamatory material, it’s then obliged to block access to it.
“There comes a point when someone must take responsibility for this material,” Retkin told the Independent.
“These allegations were posted anonymously so there is no way of suing the author. Where it has appeared on internet discussion forums we have asked them to remove it but it keeps popping up again at other internet addresses. The only solution is for Google to remove it and give an undertaking they will remove it permanently.”
Retkin told webpronews.com that he believes that competitors are responsible for the posts.
Google has responded to Retkin by stating that it has removed the offending links, and that it is “not responsible for the content of any query which may be presented to a user of Google’s web search service”.
If Retkin is successful in suing Google, it may set a legal precedent that could mean that in the UK, at least, Google is held responsible for all of the pages it has indexed — all 11.5 billion of them.
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