Google has settled a lawsuit out of court which was brought by England’s Daniel Hegglin over online abuse. At the same time, the company has announced that it will soon cease to offer plugins with its popular Chrome web browser while T Mobile will let its customers use Google’s music streaming as much as they want to.
The hegglin suit came after Europe’s High Court ruled earlier this year that Google could be held responsible for defamatory content which comes up under Google searches of any individual. Hegglin has sought an injunction to force Google to block all traces in its search results of online abuse against him. He had claimed that someone was anonymously engaging in a defamatory campaign of abuse against him on the internet.
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The BBC reported that Hegglin’s lawyer Hugh Tomlinson QC told Mr. Justice Jay at a High Court hearing, “I am pleased to report that the parties have now settled the matter. The settlement includes significant efforts on Google’s part to remove the abusive material from Google-hosted websites and from its search results. Mr Hegglin will now concentrate his energies on bringing the person responsible for this campaign of harassment to justice.”
By agreeing to the out of court settlement Google avoided taking the chance that a precedent would be set which would open the floodgates for lawsuits to be brought against it if the company had lost in court.
Meanwhile in a blog post Justin Schuh, Google Software Engineer and Plug-in Retirement Planner, said “Currently Chrome supports NPAPI plugins, but they are blocked by default unless the user chooses to allow them for specific sites (via the page action UI). In April 2015 NPAPI support will be disabled by default in Chrome and we will unpublish extensions requiring NPAPI plugins from the Chrome Web Store. Although plugin vendors are working hard to move to alternate technologies, a small number of users still rely on plugins that haven’t completed the transition yet. We will provide an override for advanced users (via chrome://flags/#enable-npapi) and enterprises (via Enterprise Policy) to temporarily re-enable NPAPI while they wait for mission-critical plugins to make the transition.
In other Google news T Mobile has exempted the company’s music streaming services from its limited data plans. This means that T Mobile customers will be able to use Google’s services as much as they want to without using up any of their limited total of Internet use per month.
