Google has asked the High Court of Australia to overturn a 2020 ruling it says could have a “devastating” effect on the wider internet. In a statement from the search giant on Friday, Google says it will be forced to ‘act as censor’ if the nation’s highest court does not overturn a decision that awarded a lawyer $40,000 of libel damages for an article the company had linked to through its search engine, reports .

In 2016, George Defteros, a Victorian lawyer whose list of former clients included people involved in the Melbourne case, contacted Google to ask the company to remove a 2004 article from . The article featured stories about murder charges filed by prosecutors against Defteros in the deaths of three men. These charges were later dropped in 2005. The company refused to remove the article from its search results because it considered the publication to be a reliable source.

The case eventually went to court, with Defteros successfully asserting the article and Google search results defaming him. The judge overseeing the case ruled Ages news reports had suggested that Defteros had been comfortable with Melbourne’s criminal underground. The Victoria Court of Appeal later rejected a bid by Google to overturn the decision.

From Google’s perspective, this is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. “A hyperlink is not, in itself, the communication of what it points to,” the company argues in its submission to the High Court. If the 2020 ruling stands, Google says it will make it “responsible as publisher for any subject matter published on the web to which its search results provide a hyperlink,” including news from trusted sources. In its defence, the company points to a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada which held that a hyperlink in itself is never a publication of defamatory material.

We contacted Google for comment.