GOOGLE SUED BY ANOTHER IDIOT WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND INTERNET LAW
Brian Retkin, a 48-year old British man, is suing Google, claiming the search engine is somehow responsible for the accuracy and defamatory nature of everything written on the internet. Retkin is accused of profiting …
Context & Ripple Effects
Brian Retkin, a British man who spoke to WebProNews a day earlier about his case (publicly defended the suit), is now claiming Google bears responsibility for defamatory material its engine surfaces. The framing matters more than the filing itself: it treats an index as a publisher, not a conduit.
It lands amid an existing argument over where intermediary responsibility begins and ends — including blogosphere pushback at Lawrence Lessig's position on content liability in early 2006 (the Lessig dispute) — and follows other suits attacking how Google ranks or presents third parties' material, such as the 2006 claim over a site's zero score in results (that ranking suit).
First-order effects
- Google must answer a defamation theory that would make it liable for everything it indexes — a direct threat to the conduit status its search business depends on.
- Retkin, accused of profiting from the underlying dispute, converts a personal grievance into public leverage by litigating through the press.
Second-order effects
- Every comparable filing raises the cost of Google's default posture of not editing results, pushing it toward demonstrating why automated indexing differs from editorial publication.
- Rival engines watch the same docket: any court sympathy for publisher-style liability would apply to them equally, making this an industry-wide defensive problem rather than a Google-only one.
Third-order effects
- If claimants keep shopping these theories, search engines face structural pressure to build takedown and filtering apparatus resembling publishers' legal operations rather than pure algorithmic neutrality.
- The recurring pattern points toward courts eventually drawing a clearer line between indexing and authorship — a line whose placement will define platform liability for years.
The trend: Search engines are being drawn from neutral-conduit status into publisher-style liability fights over third-party content, one claimant at a time.