That one of the world’s biggest companies rides roughshod over a New Zealand court name suppression tells you all you need to know about the giants of Silicon Valley, argues Toby Manhire.

Imagine if a media company told you the name of the man accused of killing Grace Millane. Imagine if, in defiance of a very clear court ruling of interim name suppression, that company told you his name in an email – spelling it out, even, in the subject header.

Unthinkable? That’s exactly what happened in the early hours of Tuesday this week.

The media company wasn’t the Herald or Stuff. It wasn’t TVNZ or Newshub or RNZ. New Zealand media outlets, from the hobbyist bloggers to the biggest broadcasters, respected the proscription on naming the accused. Of course they did: they understand consequences for breaching such an order, and in fact spend significant time and resource policing their social media channels to ensure their audience doesn’t breach suppression either.

Not just because the courts would take action against them for doing so. They understand, too, that it would be morally odious to do so: it could risk damaging the course of justice in an appalling murder that has left a family distraught and sent waves of grief and upset through the country.

The company that paid precisely zero heed to all that is a media and technology corporation from Silicon Valley. A global colossus against which all of New Zealand’s media companies combined amount to a dim pixel. The company is Google. Shortly after midnight on Tuesday this week, it delivered to everyone signed up to its “what’s trending in New Zealand” email the name of the 26-year-old accused of the most headlined crime in this country in 2018.

Yesterday the minister of justice, Andrew Little, castigated offshore media companies that had, outside New Zealand’s jurisdiction, chosen to name the accused. In the main, those outlets have at least geoblocked these stories, meaning they’re not immediately accessible from New Zealand. Little also added his voice to repeated pleas from the Police for social media users not to post the name of the accused. Over recent years we’ve grown used to angry, vengeful or attention-seeking social media users posting suppressed names. The digital titans’ typical response has been to throw their arms in the air. We’re impotent! We’ll do something if you alert us to it! Maybe!

But this is next-level. You didn’t have to go searching to find the name on the internet. Google put it right in your inbox. You didn’t even need to click to open the email. His name was in the subject field.

Shouldn’t Google then be hauled before the courts? What did they have to say for themselves – was this defensible, and what processes did they have in place to stop this sort of thing happening? A spokesperson for Google in New Zealand (based in Australia) responded to those questions by saying, “we wouldn’t comment on specifics”.

That’s a no-comment on the specific fact that they dispatched an email with the name of the accused – information unequivocally suppressed by NZ courts – in the headline. They directed me, however, to Google’s “legal removal requests” page, where users can submit material they believe “may violate the law” so that the company might “consider blocking, removing or restricting access to it”. Quite how they might block or remove an email sent several hours earlier was not clear.

In rationalising such a reactive, wild-west approach on questions like these, companies such as Google and Facebook like to plead that they are not in the business of censorship, that they embrace the “open internet”, and that – hey – they’re tech companies, all of this is automated. What can we do, they protest, issuing a quick shrug before returning to the important task of counting the money. After all you can hardly haul an algorithm before a judge, can you? An algorithm is intangible, untouchable!

And that’s true, you can’t put an algorithm in the stocks, even if that’s a theatrically appealing thought. But you can bring to heel companies that are having a malign impact on your democracy. Google and Facebook may revel in their tech-utopian borderless-world waffle, but they are not beyond regulation. It’s a miracle, really, that they’ve so successfully evaded any meaningful regulation for so long.

Around the world, governments are waking up to this. In examples such as Europe’s “right to be forgetten” rules, it’s dawning on lawmakers that Google and Facebook and the rest are not Gods or weather. Like the rest of us they must adhere to the laws of nation states in which they operate. If you doubt that they operate in New Zealand, consider the millions of public money poured into them – money which once would have fed back into systems which generated local journalism. And we all know how they feel about paying tax.

New Zealand is slowly beginning to scrutinise these digital giants – Facebook sent emissaries from Sydney to Wellington yesterday to speak to government officials about “privacy, content governance and site integrity” – but we’re still well off the pace. There was no New Zealand presence among the representatives of eight parliaments who gathered in London for an “international grand committee on disinformation and fake news”, spurred by the urgent concern about the social media giant’s impact on elections and democracy more generally. Mark Zuckerberg was invited, over and over again. He failed to show, so they empty-chaired him.

In Australia they’re waking up, too. This week its competition regulator called for the creation of a new regulator to check the extraordinary and disproportionate dominance of Facebook and Google, demanding more transparency around the hallowed algorithm and emphasising its impact on the public good that is journalism.

“When you get to a certain stage and you get market power, which both Google and Facebook have, with that comes special responsibilities and that means, also, additional scrutiny,” said the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman. The most extraordinary thing of all is that such a statement of the bleedingly obvious could be extraordinary.

Facebook and Google continue to get away with it in part because they perpetuate a residual image of the original digital iconoclasts, the techbro disruptors, sticking it to The Man. But this is breathtaking bullshit, the finest Jedi mind trick of our day. They are The Man. These companies have a combined value of well over a trillion US dollars. The freewheeling techbros have grown into arrogant, avaricious, suppurating Leviathans.

They preach the open internet on the back of the most opaque machines in big business. They’ve released a wrecking ball into traditional media, and so the public square, and so democracy. They’re brilliant and addictive, and staffed by some of the cleverest people in the world. It’s hard to imagine life without them. And they’ve hoovered up all the revenue and none of the responsibility.

No longer are these anything like the anti-establishment hackers who vow ‘don’t be evil’ – Google ditched that motto years ago. They wield a kind of power that we’ve never before seen. And they wield it with something close to impunity. They know things about you that you don’t even know yourself.

They just sent out an email to an unknown number of New Zealanders that defied a court ruling by naming the man accused of murder in our country’s most infamous crime of 2018. But it’s a small country somewhere down the arse end of the world. How much does it matter to them? They have no comment.

Update, December 13, 3.45pm: Google has sent through a statement. “We respect New Zealand law and understand the concerns around what is clearly a sensitive case. When we receive valid court orders, including suppression orders, we review and respond appropriately. In this case, we didn’t receive an order to take action. We are looking for ways to better ensure courts have the tools to quickly and easily provide these orders to us in the future.”

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The Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Amendment Bill passed its third reading in Parliament, ushering in the partial decriminalisation of medicinal cannabis use. Longtime user and activist Rebecca Reider was there.

A few years ago, deep in the throes of medicinal cannabis activism under an intransigent National government, I started trying to visualise our eventual victory party. I needed to believe that we could win one day. It would be like the triumph of the Marriage Equality bill, I imagined. The gallery of Parliament would be full; all of us medicinal cannabis patients would be there together; we’d rise up and sing at the end, our voices coalescing in a harmony of justice. Maybe instead of a waiata, we’d sing a Bob Marley song.

That was definitely not the scene yesterday.

It was a historic day, technically speaking. Labour’s Medicinal Cannabis Amendment Bill passed its final reading in Parliament, opening the way to a legal medicinal cannabis industry in this country.

But it wasn’t the victory party of my dreams. There were fewer than 30 people in the public gallery to watch the bill pass. In contrast, earlier this year, at the first reading of Green MP Chlöe Swarbrick’s more ambitious medicinal cannabis bill, the gallery was packed to overflowing with fans who had to be shushed for cheering too loudly. Yet that bill was voted down, and we were left with Labour’s more cautious bill that has not inspired many medicinal cannabis patients.

I was hoping to cry tears of joy in Parliament yesterday anyway. Instead the closest I got to tears was when Chlöe Swarbrick spoke, turning upward to face the spectators in the balcony, acknowledging all the work by campaigners to get to this point and telling us: “I am sorry that we could not make this bill everything that you wanted it to be.”

One obstacle to total celebration is that there are many unknowns as to how the new law will play out. Who will access cannabis, and how, all depends on regulations that will be set over the next 12 months. It could be a sensible regime like Canada’s, or a red tape nightmare like Australia’s.

And of course, most patients will still live in illegality until those regulations are defined and implemented. Under the new law, only dying people in “palliation” will have an immediate defence against criminal charges. At the Health Select Committee hearings on this bill, patient after patient stood up and asked MPs to extend the legal defence and protect us all – to no avail. It was hard to sit and listen to Labour MPs in the House yesterday thank us for our heartfelt submissions, when they themselves had not acted on those submissions. When I walked out of the Beehive after the bill passed, the herbal medicines in my backpack were no less illegal than they were when I walked in.

It’s tricky, spiritually, to be an activist sometimes. Always working for something better can leave one feeling perpetually at war with reality, dissatisfied. This is not necessarily a happy way to live. Perhaps we need to get better at savouring progress, even when utopia isn’t here yet.

So I’m carving out some mental space to marvel. It’s just over three years since Helen Kelly first announced on TV that she was using illicit medicinal cannabis to cope with cancer. I joined the movement some months later after barely escaping a criminal conviction myself; there still weren’t many of us speaking out. But by the time the submission process for the Medicinal Cannabis Amendment Bill rolled around this year, Parliamentary staff were at pains to figure out what to do with hundreds of people admitting to illegal activity in their submissions.

Our collective voices have caused a change in the law, in a few years’ time.

This is all the more amazing because sick and disabled people – often cast to the margins, the people our society doesn’t want to look at – have starred in this debate.

For me, the experience of ten-plus years of chronic illness had always been one of shame, of not wanting to burden people who didn’t really want to know about my suffering. But in this campaign, for many of us, suffering became not a burden but a platform. The voices of chronically ill and dying people have been front and centre. Journalists have portrayed us honourably. When else has the media so positively embraced people who state that they are breaking the law?

These human stories caused a shift of national opinion from around 50% public approval of medicinal cannabis a few years ago, to around 80% in more recent polls – compelling the coalition government to promise action.

Together we can change things. It may take a lot longer than we hoped; we may not get the exact result (or victory party) we hoped for. But persistent, engaging storytelling does work.

As much as some of us would love the medicinal cannabis campaign to be over, it’s not. One new bit of news dropped during the parliamentary debate yesterday, when Minister David Clark announced that the Ministry of Health will release a consultation paper in the new year, asking for public input on the design of the medicinal cannabis regulations. So patients and caregivers will have to get vocal once again.

I also expect that many medicinal patients will now shift our energies to campaigning for the referendum on full legalisation of cannabis. One of the biggest disappointments of the new law is that there is no provision for patients and caregivers to grow our own medicine. This leaves us lagging well behind patient rights in Canada and much of the US. But could the referendum fix this by just granting home-growing rights to everyone?

Home growing is a lifeline for many medicinal users. Chronically ill people often don’t have much money; why should anyone have to buy from a large cannabis corporation when they could just grow it safely in their own backyard?

The National Party’s performance in the debate yesterday also deserves a mention. There was an impressive level of unhinged ranting. Three National MPs, including Simon Bridges, declared that a major danger with the government’s bill is that dying people could go smoke cannabis outside schools. I don’t know a lot of dying people, but I hadn’t heard before that smoking at schools was one of their main hobbies.

Still, even the National MPs, in full obstruction mode, had to pay lip service to medicinal cannabis. They had to find ways to oppose the bill while still claiming to be compassionate people who believe cannabis is medicinal. This was some of the clearest evidence that our story has won. And in time, perhaps, the law will finish catching up. I’m visioning our victory party for the referendum now.