OTTAWA— It’s a global ban that has stunned free speech advocates.

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled Google is barred from displaying anywhere in the world the websites of a company accused of counterfeiting a Canadian technology company’s products.

The 7-2 ruling has broad implications for freedom of expression, the reach of courts to protect intellectual property and other rights, and for the operations of Internet-based businesses.

In upholding a sweeping B.C. lower court injunction against Google’s ability to display commercial content that was at the heart of a court battle over trade secrets, the country’s top court may make Google a more powerful player in the information marketplace worldwide, said University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist.

“The decision will ultimately grant Google more power, not less,” Geist wrote in an online analysis of the decision.

“What happens if a Chinese court orders it to remove Taiwanese sites from the index? Or if an Iranian court orders it to remove gay and lesbian sites from the index? Since local content laws differ from country to country, there is a great likelihood of conflicts. That leaves two possible problematic outcomes: local courts deciding what others can access online or companies such as Google selectively deciding which rules they wish to follow.

“The Supreme Court of Canada did not address the broader implications of the decision,” Geist said, content to base its reasoning on the need to address the commercial harm sustained by a Canadian company, the limited burden on Google, and the ease with which any global takedown order could be adjusted if Google could bring back evidence an order violated another country’s laws.

In the end, the ruling “invites more global takedowns without requiring those seeking takedowns to identify potential conflicts or assess the implications in other countries,” he said.

It’s the second hard-hitting ruling against Google in two days. On Tuesday, European authorities hammered Google for using its dominance in online searches to direct customers to its own businesses and fined the tech giant about $3.6 billion Canadian.

On Wednesday, Google said little in response to the Canadian high court ruling.

“We are carefully reviewing the court’s findings and evaluating our next steps,” said Google spokesman Aaron Brindle.

The judgment is the “first global de-indexing order” and will be “extremely important” worldwide because it gives a remedy against third-parties such as Google or Internet service providers who are the “gatekeepers” of information, said McCarthy Tetreault lawyer Barry Sookman, who intervened on behalf of six groups representing music composers and publishers.

Other intervenors were dismayed by the ruling.

Dinah PoKempner, general counsel of Human Rights Watch, warned the Supreme Court “put access to information at risk by trying to enforce Canadian law in every country on Earth.”

“Other countries may soon follow this example, in ways that more obviously force Google to become the world’s censor. If every country tries to enforce its own idea of what is proper to put on the Internet globally, we will soon have a race to the bottom where human rights will be the loser.”

Wednesday’s ruling involved Equustek Solutions Inc., a Vancouver-based manufacturer of networking devices that allow complex industrial equipment made by one manufacturer to communicate with the equipment of another, a kind of inter-linking technology.

In 2011 it got into a messy dispute when its distributor, Datalink Technologies Gateways Inc., headed by Morgan Jack, began to re-label one of the products and passed it off as its own. Equustek claims Datalink then acquired some of its confidential technology and began to manufacture copycat products. Sued by Equustek, Datalink first denied the accusations, then fled the province, and continued to carry on business, selling products all over the world from an unknown location.

The allegations have not been proven in court, but several court orders were issued against Datalink to stop selling Equustek inventory until the allegations could be tested.

Google became involved when Equustek asked the tech giant to drop Datalink from its search engines. Google said it would comply with a court order, and at first removed or “de-indexed” 345 web pages, but not Datalink’s websites. So Datalink had a workaround. It was able to move “the objectionable content” to new pages within its websites, the court found. And Google had only blocked the searches on Google.ca, not Google.com or its other country-specific search engines.

A B.C. court then granted a broader injunction against Google’s display of Datalink’s websites anywhere in the world. Google challenged that global gag order all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada where it lost Wednesday.

The high court said Google, which controls 70-75 per cent of all global searches on the Internet, might not be the one causing the direct harm to the small B.C. tech company, but it is not a bystander. Rather, Google is a key player that “facilitated” the harm, Abella wrote.

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The judges wrote that, where necessary, a Canadian court can grant an injunction to prohibit wrongful conduct “anywhere in the world.”

“The problem in this case is occurring online and globally. The Internet has no borders — its natural habitat is global,” wrote Justice Rosalie Abella. The only way to ensure the injunction worked “was to have it apply where Google operates — globally.”

“This decision will very likely have enormous implications around the world,” said lawyer Barry Sookman, because it is a statement of general principles about the powers of courts, and will influence common law jurisdictions in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and elsewhere.

It could be used to go after those who breach intellectual property, trademark, or copyright law, or to safeguard privacy rights, for example in the case of a major data breach where a corporation loses control over customers’ private information, or in cyber-stalking, harassment or defamation cases where a person’s reputation is affected by global distribution of slanderous material online.

Victims may be able to go to court to force Google and other search engines to take down websites that are carrying on illegal activity whose owners otherwise can’t be found, said Sookman.

But David Christopher, a spokesman for OpenMedia which intervened in the case, said in a release it is “critical” to have safeguards in place to protect free expression and access to information for Canadians and Internet users around the globe.

“The Internet is a global phenomenon, and there is great risk that governments and commercial entities will see this ruling as justifying censorship requests that could result in perfectly legal and legitimate content disappearing off the web because of a court order in the opposite corner of the globe. That would be a major setback to citizens’ rights to access information and express ourselves freely.”

The majority on the Supreme Court of Canada, which upheld two lower B.C. court orders, rejected all of Google’s arguments.

“This is not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values; it is an order to de-index websites that are in violation of several court orders. We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods,” wrote Abella.

The court said Google admitted it would not be inconvenienced “in any material way,” nor would it incur significant expense, in de-indexing the Datalink websites.

Google acknowledged it can and often does “exactly what is being asked of it in this case, that is, alter search results . . . to avoid generating links to child pornography and websites containing ‘hate speech,’ ” the court wrote. It said Google will also comply with notices of possible copyright infringement and removes such material.

The majority decision was written by Abella, and the chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, and five others — Michael Moldaver, Andromache Karakatsanis, Richard Wagner, Clement Gascon, and Russell Brown — concurred with it.

In a sharp dissent, Justices Suzanne Cote and Malcolm Rowe disagreed, saying the case called for “judicial restraint.”

The two dissenting judges said although the original injunction was meant to stop immediate harm to the Canadian company until the counterfeiting and trademark infringement claim could be determined by the courts, “the order against Google . . . is final in effect.” It said the counterfeit claim had not been tested in court, and it might never be if the injunction stood, because there’d be no incentive to bring the case to court if a company’s ability to operate could simply be shut down by injunction.

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