Wikipedia
co-founder Jimmy Wales has said an attempt by France to give an online privacy
ruling global force is opening up a "disastrous can of worms" and
could spur global censorship.
Google appealed last month
against an order from the French data protection authority to remove certain
web search results globally.
A 2014 ruling by the European
Court of Justice allowed people to ask the likes of Google or Microsoft's Bing
to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from web results brought up by
searching for their name.
The measure, known as the
"right to be forgotten", has pitted privacy campaigners against
defenders of free speech.
"One of the most
disturbing things is the regulators in France have demanded that Google hide
things globally, not just within the borders of France," Wales told
Reuters late on Thursday on the sidelines of the Brilliant Minds conference in
Stockholm.
"That's just opening a
disastrous can of worms, because then it becomes a ridiculous race to the
bottom, where the Internet is censored by the most restrictive
jurisdictions," he said.
"And nobody thinks we
should censor based on the whims of the Chinese government, for example. But
that's the path that people go down if they are not careful."
Google complied with France's
request, but it scrubbed results only across its European websites, arguing
that to go further would set a dangerous precedent on the territorial reach of
national laws.
Wales said Wikipedia was also
working to adhere to the legislation.
The French data protection
authority argues that a person’s right to privacy should not depend on where an
online search is made, and counters allegations of censorship by noting that
the links in question, hidden when a person's name is searched for directly,
can still be found by searching in different ways.
Wales said his staff at the Wikimedia
Foundation, the non-profit organization that runs the online encyclopedia,
assembled and written by Internet users around the world, were spending more
and more time dealing with national regulations on the Internet.
"We've all become somehow
kind of amateur lawyers on things like copyright," he said.
(Reporting by Mia Shanley;
Editing by Kevin Liffey)
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