Link to the court ruling from the article (in German): https://the-decoder.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/26_O_869_26_begl_Abschrift_Urteil_v_28_05_2026_Geschwarzt_Geschwarzt_Geschwarzt.pdf
Found the article on HN. The article itself is meh, but I couldn’t find any other site reporting on it.
I don’t think this can be handled as easily as with cookies or third-party connections that require consent, because Google apparently plans to eventually replace the traditional search engine results pages (SERPs) entirely with an AI chat interface.
In that case, they would have to offer a completely different product just for Germany, or leave this market altogether. Neither option is likely to be viable for Google.
Setting up the AI chat so that it doesn’t provide dangerous answers is, in my opinion, also out of the question, since this can never be guaranteed due to the way LLMs work.
If they did that, then they’ll be fined constantly.
The point is that they shouldn’t be doing that. We, as a international community, need to make that illegal.
And this is the first stone for that.
Yes, absolutely. I completely agree with you, but unfortunately, for the reasons mentioned, I still think it’s unlikely that this welcome ruling will have any real impact.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m just being realistic. This is by no means an argument against holding the tech giants accountable—we absolutely should!
Might be only Germany for the moment, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you see more jurisdictions ruling this way, e.g. there’s a case in Canada at the moment where it claimed a musician was a sex offender.
And locally, in Australia we don’t have the US style “safe harbor” protections, so companies are already liable for content shown on their sites regardless of who creates it. If courts already won’t accept “But somebody else wrote that” as a defence, they won’t accept it when it’s the companies own products producing it.