<
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/no-country-should-be-making-speech-rules-world>
"It’s a simple proposition: no single country should be able to restrict speech
across the entire internet. Any other approach invites a swift relay race to
the bottom for online expression, giving governments and courts in countries
with the weakest speech protections carte blanche to edit the internet.
Unfortunately, governments, including democracies that care about the rule of
law, too often lose sight of this simple proposition. That’s why EFF,
represented by Johnson Winter Slattery, has moved to intervene in support of X,
formerly known as Twitter’s legal challenge to a global takedown order from
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. The Commissioner ordered X and Meta to take
down a post with a video of a stabbing in a church. X complied by geo-blocking
the post so Australian users couldn’t access it, but it declined to block it
elsewhere. The Commissioner asked an Australian court to order a global
takedown.
Our intervention calls the court’s attention to the important public interests
at stake in this litigation, particularly for internet users who are not
parties to the case but will nonetheless be affected by the precedent it sets.
A ruling against X is effectively a declaration that an Australian court (or
its eSafety Commissioner) can prevent internet users around the world from
accessing something online, even if the law in their own country is quite
different. In the United States, for example, the First Amendment guarantees
that platforms generally have the right to decide what content they will host,
and their users have a corollary right to receive it.
We’ve seen this movie before. In
Google v Equustek, a company used a trade
secret claim to persuade a Canadian court to order Google to delete search
results linking to sites that contained allegedly infringing goods from
Google.ca and all other Google domains, including Google.com and Google.co.uk.
Google appealed, but both the British Columbia Court of Appeal and the Supreme
Court of Canada upheld the order. The following year, a U.S. court held the
ruling couldn’t be enforced against Google US.
The Australian takedown order also ignores international human rights
standards, restricting global access to information without considering less
speech-intrusive alternatives. In other words: the Commissioner used a
sledgehammer to crack a nut."
Via
The RISKS Digest Volume 34 Issue 24:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/34/24#subj20
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
