On Tuesday, the Canadian Supreme Court is scheduled to hear an appeal whose outcome will help shape access to information on the global Internet. Recognizing the high stakes, the court has heard the arguments of many interested observers, such as our organization, a free press group based in the U.S.

As is often the case, the facts of the initial dispute do not immediately reveal the potential for a precedent-setting legal showdown. In Equustek Solutions Inc. v. Jack, a group of British Columbia plaintiffs, who create devices allowing complex equipment made by one manufacturer to communicate with similar equipment made by another, sought an injunction under Canadian law, preventing the defendants, who, according to the court, operate a “network of websites through which they advertise and sell their product,” from selling competing products online.

But this garden-variety intellectual property battle took a different turn when the plaintiffs, after obtaining their injunction against the defendants, requested that Google — which was not a party to the lawsuit — remove search results linking to the defendants’ webpages. The plaintiffs asked for this relief not only on the Canadian extension of the search engine (google.ca), but also on all of Google’s websites around the world.

While Google removed the links on google.ca, it declined the demand for worldwide deletion. The plaintiffs, and now the British Columbia Court of Appeal, have taken the position that Google’s refusal to scrub these results from the entire search engine aids the defendants in violating the court order. But simply because a litigant’s website can be accessed through a search other than on a country-specific domain does not give that nation’s courts authority to compel search engines to remove links globally.

The B.C. Court of Appeal recognized that google.ca is the dedicated site for users within Canada, but that acknowledgment in the end carried no weight. Without pointing to any authority, the lower court has done what is not only virtually unheard of, but also unreasonable — unilaterally deciding to regulate the free flow of information worldwide.

The lower court’s ruling follows the European Union’s creation of a “right to be forgotten” in May 2014. The Court of Justice of the European Union found that Europeans can ask search engines to delete links with their personal information that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive.” French regulators are now trying to implement this new right by compelling search engines to “delist” links worldwide. Although Canada has not established its own “right to be forgotten,” the trial court’s sweeping attempt to remove Google search results across all domains shows that it believes one nation can censor the Internet.

Google argues that its Canadian site should handle Canadian court-sanctioned requests for removals and those of British Columbia citizens, such as the plaintiffs, who primarily reach the search engine through google.ca. While people may be able to access other Google sites from within Canada, that cannot, by itself, warrant ordering Google to delete search results on all of its domains. Such a rule would set Canada on a collision course with the protections for free expression and the right to receive information around the globe.

And it’s not just Google’s freedom of expression that is at risk. Because search engines provide the public with a primary way to obtain news, restricting content on search engines also limits the ability of news organizations to reach the ever-growing global audience for information. Concerned that this decision could lead one day to justifying the extraterritorial censorship of news, our organization, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, along with numerous other free press groups and news organizations, including AOL Inc., The Associated Press, and Dow Jones & Company, Inc., intervened to oppose the trial court’s interference with fundamental rights around the world.

Permitting such a ruling to stand would threaten journalistic freedom and the rights of people to educate and inform themselves online. If one country can control what you see on the Internet, what is to prevent others from doing the same? The Canadian court had warned against worldwide orders because they “might place limits on expression in another country” and “offend another state’s core values.” But its decision has done just that — and must be reversed in the name of preserving an open Internet.

Bruce D. Brown is the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, D.C. Ariel B. Glickman is the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Legal Fellow at the Reporters Committee.

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