Australian Court Sides with Google in Defamation Suit

An Australian court sided with Google on a defamation lawsuit Wednesday ruling that the US tech giant is not a publisher of a defamatory article but a search engine.

Australia’s High Court has ruled Google is not legally responsible for defamatory news articles as it is not the publisher of such content.

Back in 2004, the Australian lawyer George Defteros, who made a name for himself representing members of the Melbourne underworld, sued Google arguing that the tech giant defamed him by publishing Australian outlet The Age’s 2004 article about his arrest on conspiracy and incitement to murder charges that were dropped in 2005

Although it had been notified of the defamatory article in February 2016, Google did not remove it until Dec. 2016, enabling users to access the article 150 times in that time span.

Back in 2020, the Supreme Court sided with Defteros and awarded him $40,000 in damages, ruling that ruled that the article defamed Defteros by implying he crossed a line from a professional lawyer to a confidant and friend of criminal elements.

After Victoria’s Court of Appeal refused in 2021 its attempts to overturn the defamation ruling in favor of Defteros, the US tech giant then took the matter to the High Court.

A majority of justices decided on Wednesday that Google as a search engine only provided hyperlinks to a defamatory article by The Age and was not its publisher.

As per the Newcastle Herald, Chief Justice Susan Kiefel and Justice Jacqueline Gleeson said in a joint statement that the hyperlink, in reality, is merely a tool that enables a person to navigate to another webpage.

It’s a win for Google in a years-long suit in which the US company argued that it is the operator of the webpage who communicates the content to the user and that article hyperlinks only communicates that something exists.

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