Daniel Hegglin, a British businessman working for Morgan Stanley and living in Hong Kong, was the target of a sustained anonymous campaign that described him, among other things, as a murderer, a Nazi, a Ku Klux Klan sympathiser, a paedophile and an insider trader. The material was published across thousands of web pages, and a Google search for his name returned it prominently. He could not find the person responsible, so in June 2014 he sued in the High Court in London, naming that person as “persons unknown” and joining Google Inc as the second defendant. He asked the court to order Google to stop returning the material in its search results and to help identify its author.
What the court decided
Google argued that the English court had no business hearing the claim, since Mr Hegglin lived in Hong Kong and Google is an American company. Mr Justice Bean rejected that in July 2014 (Hegglin v Person(s) Unknown and Google Inc [2014] EWHC 2808 (QB)): Mr Hegglin had business and personal ties to England, and the material damaged or risked damaging his reputation here. Permission to serve the claim on Google outside the jurisdiction was given and a five-day trial was fixed for 24 November 2014.
Shortly before the trial Mr Justice Edis dealt with the costs of the case ([2014] EWHC 3793 (QB)). He remarked on Google’s budget of £1.68 million against the claimant’s £604,000 for a case that was “factually simple (although legally complex)”, and he noted that Google’s position had shifted during the proceedings, including an admission that it had technical means of blocking material which it had earlier denied, and a concession that millions of searches in the United Kingdom were carried out through google.com rather than google.co.uk.
Case outcome
On the first morning of the trial the case settled. The terms were not disclosed, but Mr Hegglin’s counsel told the court that Google had made commitments to remove the defamatory material from its hosted websites and from its search results. No judgment was given on the central question, which was whether Google could be made liable, or made subject to an injunction, for what its search engine returned about a person.
What applies now
The case was fought in the months after the Court of Justice of the European Union decided Google Spain (C-131/12) in May 2014, the judgment that created what became known as the right to be forgotten. At that time Google took the view that the ruling applied only to its European domains, and one of the things Mr Hegglin wanted was removal from google.com worldwide. That question was later answered against claimants: in Google v CNIL (C-507/17) in 2019 the court held that delisting need only cover the searcher’s own jurisdiction, and Google’s practice is to delist on its UK versions and to apply geolocation to searches made from the UK.
Since the United Kingdom left the European Union the right to have search results removed rests on Article 17 of the UK GDPR, the right to erasure, and on the Data Protection Act 2018. The first English trial of the right, NT1 and NT2 v Google [2018] EWHC 799 (QB), set out how the balance between the individual and the public interest is struck, and the Information Commissioner can order Google to delist where a request has been wrongly refused. For defamation itself the position of a search engine is protected: under section 10 of the Defamation Act 2013 a court will not hear a claim against anyone other than the author, editor or publisher unless it is not reasonably practicable to sue them, which is why the practical route in a case like Mr Hegglin’s today is a delisting request under data protection law, a disclosure order to identify the author, and a claim against the author once identified. How to make a delisting request that succeeds is in Making successful right to be forgotten requests to Google.
First published 24 November 2014. Reviewed and updated 28 September 2026.