Australian court holds Google is responsible for linking to defamatory websites
Tucked inside the Communications Decency Act … Jeremy Malcolm / Electronic Frontier Foundation : Liability Hammer Comes Down on Google, But Hits Users See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015 an Australian court put Google on the hook as a publisher of defamatory links, with Jeremy Malcolm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation warning that the 'liability hammer' aimed at Google lands hardest on users. The verdict ran against Germany's highest court ruling two years later that Google has no obligation to vet websites before displaying their links.
Australia's own position then swung: appeals-court rulings extended defamation responsibility to media companies over Facebook comment sections, a judge fined Google $715K over Friendlyjordies' videos, before the high court finally reversed the 2015 logic in 2022 by declaring Google is not a publisher at all.
First-order effects
- Google becomes directly exposed to defamation claims in Australia over organic search results, since the court treats displaying a link as publishing the linked content.
- Jeremy Malcolm's EFF commentary flags the immediate collateral damage: intermediaries respond to liability by removing or blocking lawful material, shifting censorship decisions from judges to platform risk teams.
Second-order effects
- Google faces pressure to geo-differentiate its product — filtering or demoting results in Australia while serving unfiltered results where courts like Germany's hold it blameless, fragmenting one global index into jurisdiction-specific ones.
- The precedent hands plaintiffs a template against other link-and-host intermediaries, and the parallel Facebook-comments rulings show Australian courts extending the same publisher framing to any company that surfaces third-party speech.
Third-order effects
- Australia's swing from 'Google is liable' to 'Google is not a publisher' within seven years shows intermediary liability law oscillating with each case rather than settling, leaving platforms to price legal uncertainty per market.
- If surfacing links counts as publishing, the same logic presses toward AI-generated summaries and answers becoming even heavier liability surfaces — a question regulators will have to resolve as search shifts from listing sources to restating them.
The trend: Courts worldwide are splitting over whether search engines are neutral distributors or publishers of what they surface, and Australia's decade-long reversal shows that classification — and platform liability with it — is still unsettled.