The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg has ruled that Russia violated Google’s rights by pressuring YouTube to remove dissenting content and reinstate a banned broadcaster. On the face of it, the judgement is a cheering defence of free speech and a clear rebuke to authoritarian overreach. But, before you cheer too much, it also hints at a potentially troubling shift in the law that could place more benign governments across the world in a tricky position.
The case, Google LLC and Others v Russia, concerned two interventions by the Kremlin. In one of them, the authorities fined Google billions of roubles for refusing to remove videos critical of the government. In the other, Moscow City Commercial Court ordered the company to reinstate and monetise the YouTube channel of Tsargrad TV, an oligarch-owned broadcaster accused of funding separatist activity in eastern Ukraine. Google had suspended the channel’s account in compliance with US sanctions, and when it failed to obey the court’s order, it was handed escalating daily fines – which at one point reached a figure so large (in dollars, a two followed by 36 zeroes) that it exceeded the world’s entire GDP.
The ECtHR found that both attempted enforcement measures violated Google’s rights to free expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The first element of the judgement said none of the videos the company refused to remove posed any threat to public safety – and the authorities’ belief that divergence from the official narrative was enough to justify intervention struck “at the very heart of the Internet’s function as a means for the free exchange of ideas and information”. The second element reaffirmed a core, if often overlooked, principle of Article 10: that freedom of expression includes the right not to be compelled to speak. Ordering Google to host Tsargrad TV’s content was found to violate this principle.
What marks the possible shift in the law, however, is not simply that the Court upheld Article 10 rights, but that it decided they applied to Google. In ruling that the platform, as a private company, had suffered a direct interference with its own rights under Article 10, it treated Google not merely as a conduit for the speech of others, but as an entity as entitled to free expression as any individual.
Which brings us to the tricky bit. By leaning so heavily on the failings of the Russian authorities, the Court left the implications of its own reasoning largely unexplored – most notably, how Google’s rights might conflict with those of users. What about Tsargrad TV’s freedom of expression, for example? Shouldn’t it, as a Google user, have Article 10 rights too? And, if so, how should such competing claims be balanced?
It was left to the Presiding Judge, Darian Pavli, writing separately in his concurring opinion, to note that these broader questions had been sidestepped. The Court’s “novel interpretation”, he observed, had been made “without further elaboration upon the nature of the interference or the role of the applicant companies as holders of Article 10 rights… If they are not to be treated as traditional publishers or distributors… what exactly are they?”
Pavli stops short of arguing that platforms should be treated as traditional publishers, but he does confirm that their role is no longer as mere conduits either. When platforms engage in curatorship, moderation and algorithmic prioritisation, they aren’t just hosting content; they’re helping to shape the public conversation. This, he suggests, is what gives them their Article 10 protections. Yet the obvious implication is that, if platforms are participants in public discourse in their own right, they may be entitled to remove content for any reason of their choosing, including the fact they disagree with it. In such a framework, it may no longer be the dissenting individual whose speech is protected, but the platform that decides to silence it – something which itself might well strike “at the very heart of the Internet’s function as a means for the free exchange of ideas and information”.
If this tension does become a recurring feature of Strasbourg jurisprudence, it’s unlikely to appear in direct legal confrontations between platforms and users. Article 10 claims can only be brought against states, not private companies. Instead, the conflict will surface in the regulation of digital platforms, where governments may soon find themselves pulled in two directions: obliged to protect users from exclusion, but also required to respect the freedom of expression of the platforms that exclude them. See what I mean by tricky?
