An insurance company in Alabama has sued Google. The reason is because the insurer does not like the links that appear on Google when people type in the name of the insurance company. Specifically, it is because two of those links paint the insurer in a very negative light.
American Income Life Insurance company is an insurer that specializes in selling life insurance, and other types of supplemental policies. It primarily sells these policies to labor unions, credit unions, and associations. This insurer has filed a lawsuit in the Jefferson County Alabama Circuit Court against Google.
Google, of course, is the most popular search engine. What do you do when you want to learn more about a particular company? You “Google it”. You type the name of the company into Google, and then you sift through the links that Google finds for you. Most people choose one of the top few links on the first page, because those are usually the ones that are the most relevant to whatever it was that you were searching for.
American Income Life Insurance company noticed that when you type their company name into Google, some of the links that pop up on the first page are ones that are not at all flattering to their company.
For example, one of the websites that appears is scam.com, under the heading “American Income Life is a Scam”. Another one, that has a less than family friendly website name, contains posts from former and prospective employees of the insurance company that say that the insurer engages in unscrupulous hiring practices.
American Income Life Insurance feels that they have lost millions of dollars because of where Google placed the unflattering links. The insurer also feels that it has experienced a reduction in potential employees as a result of the placement of those negative links. They want Google to change the order of the search results so that those particular links do not appear until the second page of the search results.
Google has rejected this idea. Google says that it provides access to publicly available websites, and is not responsible for the content of the websites themselves. It is not going to control the content of any of the websites that appear in the index. It says that it is immune from being sued over that content due to the 1996 federal Communications Decency Act. Google uses and algorithmic that decides the order that the links will appear.
It will be interesting to see how this particular lawsuit goes. Typically, the courts tend to side with Google over matters like these. This is usually because the plaintiffs in these cases are trying to impose liability on Google for content that was created by an entirely different party, and not Google itself.
Image by Thomas van de Weerd on Flickr