September 22, 2015

Does France Control What American Internet Users Are Allowed to See?

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We all saw this coming eventually, but here’s the latest on Europe’s ill-considered “right to be forgotten”:

French data protection regulators on Monday rejected Google’s bid to appeal an order that requires the company to block French results removed under Europe’s “right to be forgotten” from all of Google’s sites.

….An order from France’s Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, earlier this summer required Google to remove requests results from all versions, including Google.com, but the company appealed.

A Google spokesman said that the company was trying to cooperate with European authorities, “But as a matter of principle, we respectfully disagree with the idea that a single national Data Protection Authority should determine which Web pages people in other countries can access via search engines.”

Well, yeah. There’s just no way that a French regulator can force Google to censor results on an American website. The reason should be pretty obvious, even to a French data protection agency: If France can do this, every other country can do it too. It’s not hyperbole to say that this would be the end of the internet as we know it. Like it or not, it’s just not a tenable position.

So now this gets appealed to EU courts, and hopefully they’ll display some common sense. If they don’t, I’m not sure what happens. No other country will allow France to unilaterally dictate what their citizens are and aren’t allowed to have access to, so in the end the French won’t get their way. They just won’t. They can block sites in their own country, as the Chinese do, but practically speaking that’s all they can do.

If that’s how this ends up, the result would be a class-divided internet in France. Smart, well-educated folks would be relatively unaffected. They all know—or would quickly figure out—how to connect with Google.com and would routinely get the full story when they ran a search. Conversely, the unwashed masses mostly wouldn’t know how to do this and would obliviously continue to use Google.fr, not knowing that, unlike their elite countrymen, they were seeing an expurgated version of the world. Maybe that would be OK in France. I don’t know. But it doesn’t sound like a great way to run a country to me.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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