Google Dubiously Removed Our True Telecom Article After Complaint

Somebody claiming to be the owner of troubled Kent-based UK broadband ISP True Telecom appears to have successfully had one of our articles pulled from Google, which is despite the fact that the somewhat verbose reasoning given in the complaint appears to set a very low bar.

The article in question references our piece from 21st October 2016 (here), which summarised the fact that Ofcom had launched an investigation into how the provider handled consumer contracts and service migrations. However the target of this complaint appears to have been at least some of the 39 anonymous comments that accompanied our piece, rather than the article itself.

The vast majority of the comments referenced alleged problems with service migrations (allegations of slamming etc.), poor customer support, billing and cold calls. Since then most of the issues have been verified by industry regulators. For example, the ICO fined True Telecom £85,000 for “making illegal nuisance calls” (marketing) that gave “the impression they were from BT” (here), which the ISP later blamed on a “technical issue.”

The above is on top of a £400 fine applied by the ICO on 15th March 2017 after the ISP was found guilty of breaching section 17 of the Data Protection Act 1998 at Medway Magistrates’ Court (here), although that was such a small issue that we didn’t write anything about it at the time.

Most recently Ofcom has also slapped them with a £300,000 fine for mis-selling their landline telephone services (here). The regulator said the ISP had engaged in a “particularly aggressive form of mis-selling” (slamming – switching a service without consent), placing repeat transfer orders after end-users had tried to cancel, entering residential users into “banned” 36 month contracts and failing to keep or retain records of consent.

Suffice to say that few were surprised when the ISP announced this month that it had gone into administration (here), which occurred because the company was “unable to manage its cash flow requirements” to meet its liabilities. But last week a number of readers wrote in after they spotted that our October 2016 story had been removed from Google’s search index following a legal request made during Jan 2017, which seems to set a very low bar (here).

The request also affected two other websites, one of which is Martin Lewis’s popular Money Saving Expert forum. The fact that it combined the request for three very different websites with very different content only makes it that much harder to understand the somewhat verbose wording and examples being used in the complaint.

At this point there are a few things that need to be noted. The request states that the “customers in question have never existed in my database” (many of the gripes were about cold calls, thus not from customers) and that the comments were all “untrue“, although recent findings from Ofcom and the ICO would seem to disagree. Not to mention the many negative reviews found elsewhere around the web.

The complainant then claims to have “attempted to contact each complainer to try and resolve any issues” (except there are no contact details on public comments) and says they have “traced the IP addresses back” to a competitor (except there are no public IP addresses on comments, but this may reference one of the other two sites).

The complaint then veers off to waffle about disgruntled former staff, emails and pensioners that doesn’t seem relevant to ISPreview’s article or its comments. We assume this is related to the other sites but therein rests the problem with combining a legal complaint for three very different sources.

It would be all too easy to put the blame for this squarely upon Google’s shoulders, although the law leaves them with very little choice other than to automatically comply with such requests to cover liability because it would be impossible to fight every single one in a court (they receive millions of take-down requests). We did attempt to contact True Telecom about this but have had no reply and neither has The Register, which also covered this.

Usually if there’s concern over a specific piece of content or comment then ISPs will email us directly about it first (‘Notify and Remove‘), but on this occasion we received no such request. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward way to appeal and this situation is perhaps another example of the flaw with the whole ‘Right to be Forgotten‘ approach and similar laws.