In June, Canada's Supreme Court came down on Google—hard. It ruled that the tech giant must take down certain Google search results for pirated products. And not just in Canada, but globally. Now, Google is going south of the Canadian border to push back on this landmark court ruling. The tech giant filed an injunction Monday with the US District Court for Northern California, arguing that globally removing the search results violates US law, and thus Google should not be forced to comply with the Canadian ruling.

Because the case had already made its way to the highest court in Canada, Google should have not been able to fight the ruling. But Google is hoping to find a loophole on American soil by arguing this violates the First Amendment.

“We’re taking this court action to defend the legal principle that one country shouldn’t be able to decide what information people in other countries can access online,” says David Price, senior product counsel at Google. “Undermining this core principle inevitably leads to a world where internet users are subject to the most restrictive content limitations from every country.”

Google’s resistance to the ruling comes at a time when court orders to remove content worldwide are surging. Last month Germany passed a law ordering social media companies that operate in the country to delete hate speech within 24 hours of it being posted or face fines of up to $57 million. In May, an Austrian court ruled that Facebook must take down hateful posts directed at the country’s Green party leader. And the European Union’s top court is poised to decide whether the bloc’s “right to be forgotten” laws should extend beyond Europe’s borders. Around the world, there are dozens more cases around global takedown requests that are pending.

The problem, according to internet law experts, is that allowing country-specific social media laws to stand worldwide could set a troubling precedent. (Google has the support of both the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Wikimedia Foundation in the Canada case.) One country’s idea of acceptable speech may be another’s idea of hate speech, for instance. Countries with sharply diverging definitions of what is allowable online speech could leave us with a fractured “splinternet,” where what you see online depends on what is OK, culturally, wherever you happen to be accessing the internet. And that could threaten the global internet itself.

Tech companies—including Google, with its latest legal maneuvering—aren’t going down without a fight. But staunch resistance won’t solve its problems, says Vivek Krishnamurthy, assistant director of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, who specializes in international internet governance. “Yes, Google may end up getting a favorable decision from a US court. But it won’t stop the plaintiff from seeking enforcement in Canada,” says Krishnamurthy. “And Google faces legal and economic risks if they don’t comply with Canadian law. It adds up to a really hard business decision for the company.”

Easy Peasy Piracy

For the uninitiated: last month, a landmark decision was reached in Google v. Equustek, a case in which a British Columbia-based technology company called Equustek accused Datalink Technology Gateways, a distributor, of selling what was essentially a repackaged Equustek product. Datalink first denied any wrongdoing, then fled the country, never appearing in court—and it continued to do business outside of Canada.

As the legal saga unfolded, Equustek asked Google to take down search results for Datalink websites, which Google voluntarily did—but only on Google.ca, the country-specific version of the search engine. But Equustek appealed to higher courts and continued to pursue a global takedown of search results. The company scored big when the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Google’s argument that freedom of expression should have prevented Google from having to comply with the global order. “We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods,” the court wrote in its ruling. “The problem, in this case, is occurring online and globally. The internet has no borders; its natural habitat is global.”