On 31 March 2011, the Court of Milan declared Google, Inc., liable for defamation in relation to its Google Suggest “auto-complete” function that recommends words and characters to complete a partial search for its users.
The case was brought to court by a person whose name, when typed in the Google search field, was associated, through the “suggested searches” (now “related searches”), with the words
truffatore
(con man, swindler) and
truffa
(scam, fraud). The person’s public image as an entrepreneur and provider of educational services in the field of personal finance suffered, and the man’s lawyer argued that Google could control the content produced by the auto-complete function. In particular, the plaintiff argued that Google should have applied filters proactively to avoid injuring a person’s constitutionally guaranteed rights. In its primary line of defense, Google relied on EU E-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC), arguing that, as the mere supplier of a neutral platform that hosts data inserted by others, Google was not responsible for the query suggestions appearing in search auto-complete. The court, however, determined that this argument should not be applied to Google Auto-complete. In its opinion, in fact, “auto-complete” is an optional search facilitator that is not entirely automatic, and Google had to control over the defamatory suggestions its algorithms came up with. In particular, the court stated that “the software is only apparently ‘neutral,’ due to the fact that it is based on an automatic system of mathematic algorithms because it loses its neutrality when, as a result of the applicability of such automatism based on criteria selected by its creator, it generates inappropriate search results.” In this context, Google is not required to perform a preventive monitoring of the inappropriate results, but only to correct inappropriate results when challenged by users; however, the inappropriate Google Suggest search results were leading per se to a potential defamation.
