Supreme Court Landmark Decision Declaring "The Internet Has No Borders"

Google, Inc. v. Equustek Solutions Inc. (2017 SCC 34).

In what is being hailed as a landmark decision, the Canadian Supreme Court has affirmed a holding granting a global injunction against Google, even though it was a non-party to the underlying infringement action, requiring it to remove links from infringing websites from its global search results. In doing so the Supreme Court declared:

"The Internet has no borders – its natural habitat is global."

The case involved Equustek, a small technology company in British Colombia, and its former distributor Datalink. Datalink sold counterfeit industrial networking interface hardware via the misappropriation of Equustek's trade secrets and other intellectual property. A local court in British Colombia granted an initial injunction requiring Google to de-index certain web pages from its worldwide search results. Google voluntarily complied to remove specific webpages and URLs (uniform resource locations) from its