The High Court has found that Google is not a publisher. 

Google has won a crucial battle in the High Court after it was sued for refusing to take down a link to a newspaper article that lawyer George Defteros said was defamatory.

Mr Defteros had successfully sued Google in 2020 for $40,000 because it did not remove links to an article was about how Mr Defteros was charged in 2004 with conspiracy and incitement to murder underworld figures. The charges were dropped in 2005.

The Supreme Court of Victoria in 2020 found Google was a publisher and had defamed Mr Defteros, but the tech giant took the case to the High Court, arguing that it was only a navigator and was not a publisher of content. It likened itself to a telephone company that simply facilitated calls. 

“A hyperlink only communicates that something exists or where it exists,” Google's submissions said.

“It is the operator of the webpage who communicates the content to the user.”

Mr Defteros’ lawyers argued that Google was an active participant.

“The Google search engine is not a passive tool, such as the facility provided by a telephone company,” submissions from Mr Defteros argued.

But the High Court has ruled by a majority that Google was not the publisher of the material in question.

“A majority of the court held that the appellant did not lend assistance ... in communicating the defamatory matter contained in the ... article to the third party users,” the ruling stated.

“The provision of a hyperlink in the Search Result merely facilitated access to the ... article and was not an act of participation in the bilateral process of communicating the contents of that article to a third party.

“There being no publication, the majority found it unnecessary to consider the defences raised by the appellant,” the court said.