A Hong Kong judge has ruled Dr. Albert Yeung Sau Shing, a Hong Kong citizen and a billionaire who is also a tycoon, but probably not an impresario, can proceed to sue Google for libel.
Dr. Yeung claims that when his name is entered in Google Search, in both English and Chinese, that one of the results comes up associating the word "triad" with him. Triad has an unsavory connotation in Hong Kong, generally implying organized crime or gang connections. A search query entered in Google Search is usually tended to by autocomplete, a formula that offers up some possible results, sometimes while the query is not yet fully entered.
Yeung is the founder and Chairman of the Hong Kong-based Emperor Group, a mega-corporation involved in everything from movie-making to furniture-making.
Yeung would like money from Google, a lot of it, for not removing the unkind suggestion from their search engine. But is it libel, or just an algorithm gone rogue?
Google argued it was not responsible for the autocomplete suggestions that Yeung encountered, nor does the Hong Kong court have any jurisdiction over U.S.-based Google.
Deputy High Court Judge Marlene Ng did not agree and she told them so.
"There is a good arguable case that Google Inc. is the publisher of the Words and liable for their publication," said Ng in her ruling.
Although Google did not comment on the ruling, court documents reveal Google lawyer Gerard McCoy told the court, "The entire basis of the Internet will be compromised if search engines are required to audit what can be assessed by users using their search tools."
McCoy also pointed out the technology used in search engines does not offer a remedy for tailoring search results en masse.
"It would be impossible for Google Inc. to manually interfere with or monitor the search processes given the billions of searches conducted by Google Search," McCoy said in court documents.
For Google, for other search engines, and for goodness's sake, the implications in the outcome of this case could be game-changing.
A ruling in Dr. Yeung's favor - Judge Ng believes that is likely - could unleash an army of me-too lawsuits, potentially financially ruinous and generating a lot of instability in the search engine world. It could also cripple search engine effectiveness if drastic measures are required to satisfy so many sensitive egos. Possible solutions would be to create more accurate algorithms, or just blow up the Internet.