Search Engines and Global Takedown Orders: Google v Equustek and the Future of Free Speech Online
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court’s decision in Google v Equustek (2017) to uphold a global content takedown order remains controversial and consequential to wider debates about governing the internet. This commentary examines the Court’s underlying assumption – a common view in takedown jurisprudence – that where a portal directs a critical mass of users to a harmful site, it facilitates harm and no longer engages in valuable speech. This ran contrary to the Court’s more considered view of links in Crookes v Newton (2011) as a form of mere reference and valuable per se for enabling the internet as a public forum. This commentary argues the Court should have applied its theory from Crookes to search engine links as no different in principle from others, while conceding that, at scale, links that merely refer can facilitate harm. Drawing on the Copyright Act and the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability, the author proposes a test for takedown orders that strikes a better balance between free speech and private interests.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".