The tech giant had to agree to enhance its efforts to take down links to malicious articles, which falsely alleged an international businessman of unpleasant things. The industry experts point out that this settlement will be a test case to define the Google’s global responsibilities. Google agreed to settle the case at the high court in London.

The former Morgan Stanley banker launched the lawsuit against the international arm of Google after Internet trolling of him began across 4,000 websites. The banker said he had been wrongly described as a murderer, Ku Klux Klan sympathizer and pedophile in numerous online publications. The lawsuit was intended to force the search engine to block the false material from appearing in search results.

Although Google didn’t reveal the details of the settlement, it is known that an agreed statement was read out in court, where Google agrees to improve its efforts to remove the abusive material from its websites and search results. As for the banker, he will now focus on bringing the persons responsible for trolling to justice.

On its part, Google explained that it provides search services to millions of people and can’t be held responsible for censoring the content published online. Nevertheless, the company agreed to apply its procedures intended to assist with the removal of content violating the local applicable laws.

Google asked the banker to submit links to the relevant pages and promised to remove all of them from search results in frameworks of its “right to be forgotten” system, even though this particular case doesn’t fall under that system, as it is more about the circulation of abusive content.

The banker knew about the abuse three years ago and points out that there are still over 3,600 websites containing false material about him. While he has have already submitted a list of links to the search giant, more of them have appeared, so the process can be indefinite. The banker, who was previously based in London but then moved to Hong Kong, explains that although Google didn’t produce the abusive content, it had propagated it through the search engine. This is why the banker had to seek a British court order to force the company to prevent the publications appearing in searches.