C’est belge, les Belges
September 27th, 2006In case you haven’t seen it already, a Belgian court has ordered Google to post a lengthy order on its website google.be for at least five days. Google did that in a font size of about 7 pt – I wonder whether that’s enough “visible and clear”, as the court expressly ordered. Jean-Baptiste Soufron has blogged about the story from a legal perspective, so that I can focus on the fun (i.e. trivial) part of it:
- The mildly retarded consultant said once to Dilbert something along the lines that too much unstructured information is absolutely useless. (Falling in the category “how to hide things with words”.)
- The French (but not the Walloons, of course) say “c’est belge” if they find something not to be too intelligent.
- Another one of my favorite cartoon characters, Obelix (who is also French, like Jean Baptiste), would say instead: “Ils sont fous, les Belges”.
What I do like about the court order, though, is its symbolism: Like no other company, Google takes pride in its minimalistic front page design. Overloading that page with information 99.99 % of users don’t care about (i.e. all but the litigating parties and some information lawyers) is thus a very subtle way for a national court to demonstrate its power over a global company that has the ambition of making any information that is available, be it on the internet or in libraries, searchable and useful.
Sometimes, there is a fine line between obvious stupidity and subtle irony …
Since the post will be gone soon, here’s a screenshot of its upper half:
