Australia's high court says Google is not a publisher, reversing a lower court decision that said Google was liable for a defamatory article in search results
Context & Ripple Effects
This verdict closes a seven-year arc in Australian defamation law. Back in 2015 an Australian court held Google responsible for linking to defamatory websites, treating the search engine as a publisher of what it surfaces — a position the lower court reaffirmed in this case before today's reversal.
The ruling also lands one year after the same High Court affirmed that media companies can be held responsible for Facebook comments posted under their stories, so Australia now has a split framework on record: hosting third-party speech carries liability, while merely linking to it does not.
First-order effects
- Google exits this case without publisher liability for defamatory material in its Australian search results, and plaintiffs seeking redress must now pursue the original publisher of the article rather than the intermediary that surfaced it.
Second-order effects
- News organisations and page owners remain exposed under the earlier Facebook-comments rulings, so the practical burden of Australian defamation risk concentrates on whoever hosts or commissions content — sharpening the legal gap between platforms like Facebook and conduits like search.
Third-order effects
- Australia's linker-is-not-a-publisher line converges with Germany's 2018 position that Google need not pre-screen results for defamation, pointing toward a cross-jurisdiction norm where liability attaches to the publishing role rather than the distribution channel — though the Facebook rulings show host liability is still very much alive.
The trend: Defamation law across jurisdictions is settling on a distributor-versus-publisher distinction, with liability following whoever hosts or originates third-party speech rather than whoever indexes or links to it.