Makes perfect sense, actually, and is the result I expected. Search engines and social media have always hidden behind the protection of “the public square” and “notice board” classifications to deny liability for things.

They claimed they were just platforms and anyone could use them. They were not making “judgment calls.” There was no creation of content or filter of information or anything. The only value judgment they would make was how relevant the result was to your search terms. Which is the purpose of a search engine. They were just places where people could put up their flyers (like a notice board) or meet up freely and express their opinion (like the public square). They allowed you to filter things (through provided content filters or the use of Boolean search language), but they themselves would not make any determination regarding the value or morality or trustworthiness of the information provided.

And this used to be true. Google searches didn’t make judgment calls on the value of the opinions and data presented, it just returned relevant links. The more relevant, the higher on the list. This guaranteed multiple sources and points of view and you could decide for yourself which ones to trust.

For example, I had to look up Stormfront for a class way back when. Google didn’t give me a paragraph explaining why Stormfront was bad. It didn’t insist I must have meant something else and give me those results because no good person would look up neo-nazis. It didn’t give me a dozen articles and Reddit posts that mention Stormfront once or twice.

What it did do was give me Stormfront’s homepage. And the link below it was the Wikipedia page explaining what it was. And the links below that were news articles and blogs on Stormfront. Then at the bottom it gave me some weather sites because maybe I did just mistype “storm front”. Relevant information presented to me, actual decision on what to trust left up to me.

Then Google started exerting more control. It was bad enough when Google started automatically changing your search terms, to what it decided you actually meant, but it now it’s deciding what is allowed to be seen for the search terms you use. What’s a source Google trusts and which ones should be hidden. Judgment calls are being made.

And that’s the important part. Once you’re deciding who is and isn’t allowed to put their flyers up, you’re not an unbiased notice board. You’re not the public square. You’re a publisher. You are deciding what to show based on what you place value on. And if you are making judgment calls, you can be held liable for the result of those calls.

That’s why newspapers and magazines can be sued when they run a piece that states false information as fact. They made the judgment call to spread the libel even though it was someone else who wrote it.

Google has skirted this line for quite a while. It’s okay to block bad information, right? If you hide a website that says battery acid is safe to drink, that’s fine, right? No one is hurt if wrongthink is hidden and only trustworthy sources are presented, right? You can’t be sued if no direct injury was caused to your users, right? No harm no foul, right?

Except… with Google AI and its bad information being presented as the first result of your Google search…

Well. Now there’s provable harm.

An AI cannot make a true judgment call and it cannot be held liable. It’s a machine. It has no values, no morals, no personhood. But someone wrote the program that determines how the AI judges information and presents it and someone put it online and placed it automatically at the top of their search results and someone presented it as a reliable judge of trustworthy information (with a small disclaimer that maybe it could be wrong sometimes). So that someone is the one who should be held responsible for the judgment calls the AI makes.

And that someone is Google.

TL;DR: to be held liable for something you usually need control, cause, and damages (this is very simplified). Google used to avoid liability by not controlling search results. Judgment on what to trust was left to the users so even if relying on the information caused damage, it wasn’t Google’s fault. Google then started exerting control, but claimed it was to avoid damage to users. If users couldn’t prove Google’s search results caused harm to them, Google couldn’t be held responsible even if they had control.

But with Google AI generating bad info, people are being damaged by Google’s control over information. So now we have control, cause, and damage. Google can be now be sued for search results.