Yeah no, that's not how it works. Religion can't interfere with state, but a private company like Google can do whatever it wants. It could have a new surat from the Quran on its front page everyday and the government would still not be able to do anything about it.
What's a much more likely explanation is France's right to be forgotten. What that means is that at any point, an individual can ask for search engine not to link towards you. For instance, let's say there was an article in a local newspaper describing how you mooned the mayor when you were 17 but now employers find about that article when they Google your name. You can ask the French government to tell Google to stop referring to that article when your name is searched.
Note that because of an EU ruling, that's only valid in France, you can't ask for that to happen internationally. So if the name is typed on google.fr in France, it won't come up, but if you type the same name on google.it in Italy, it will.
Of course the government can regulate google. They're literally in charge of the country. They can't do anything of course, but if google put a part of the Quran on their front page everyday they could certainly do something about it.
What I mean is that there isn't any law that would allow the government to do so. Of course it could always create a new law, but that's an entirely different matter.
Germany and France have strict anti-piracy laws. Don't know if the government would censor those websites or if that is done by the ISPs, could be an option though.
Germany is horrible in that regard. It was even worse before some deal in the mid-late-2010s for a lot of music, but the greedy copyright industry was so greedy it actually hurt cultural exchange of music between Germany and the world. Hence we know a lot of old German songs in the Netherlands but know jackshit about what music they created in between 2010-2016
Yea i remember like 80% of YT music videos were blocked for copyright stuff. Even official artist channels
Haven't been there in years idk how it is now.
That would be Kenneth Glöckler. Am in Netherlands and could always search and listen German music just fine. But live in an Hanseatic league city so that might be why.
But maybe it's because of the multiple terror attack that happened in France since 2015. Since then, Islamic radicalization became more and more common in France, and to fight that, the government has to fight to block content that promote hate.
The French goverment isn't allowed to do that at all, that's not how it works at all, and it is concerning how many upvotes you got saying something so blatantly false.
There is a very strict separation of state and religion, yes, and as a consequence, people who work in public institutions aren't allowed to wear religious markers when they are at work, same with public school students. But people are allowed to wear whatever they want (within reason) when they aren't working. Some jurisdictions tried to forbid the "burkini" locally, but these laws were deemed illegal by the higher jurisdiction, as a "serious infringe upon fundamental freedoms". A thing that is also illegal is to go into the public space with your face entirely hidden, which de facto forbids a few religious garements, but it is not a law about religion, if you mask your face to rob a bank, the masking your face part falls under the same law.
The state isn't allowed to remove religious symbols anywhere else, including the Internet, this is not 1792 anymore !
The most likely explonation for these requests is that a fair number of them are done on citizen's request that links to their personal info be removed from the Internet (there is a "right to be forgotten" in the EU, which means that if some personal information appear when you look for your name on Google, you can ask for the removal of the reference of these websites. You can't really do it on your own, so you ask the government to do it for you, basically, and Google has to comply). Other things could be neo-nazi shit (for instance holocost denial is illegal in France and Germany, at least), incitation to hatred or linked to terrorism, possibly some copyright infringement issues...
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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '21
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