1   If your honor is damaged on the net, thefirst thing to come up to my mind is to make a request to delete the defamationpage directly to its administrator. However, some malicious administrators donot meet this.

2.   Then, next, we will consider whether wecan request deletion by using court procedures such as provisional dispositionand litigation. However, for example, if the location of the administrator isnot described on the website (including WHOIS information), or even in the caseof being described, when it is a paper company such as Argentina or USA orNevada state, there are some problems.

First of all, when you do not know theaddress of the administrator, you cannot use temporarily disposition orlitigate because the court does not come to know the delivery address in thefirst place. In addition, in the case of a foreign paper company, provisionaldisposition and litigation can be brought under certain requirements, but evenif you win, because they are located outside Japan, there is no way to forceprovisional disposition decision or judgment except that the foreign countryallows forced enforcement by using Japanese judgment and so on. After all, as ajudgment of the court came out, there is no other choice than to"ask" to delete it arbitrarily. In other words, you cannot delete ona website that does not listen to "your wish".

3.   Now is it possible to delete theslanderous article and not to display it on the search engine? This is a way todelete search results, which has been drawing attention recently.

Currently, when we browse web pages, weoften search the desired page with a search engine such as Google. Therefore,unless it is displayed as a search result in the search engine, it becomespractically difficult to access the page (unless you know the URL in advance).This will result in an effect similar to page deletion. Regarding deletion ofthis search result, the Tokyo District Court decided on October 9, 2014, and itbecame a topic because it approved it for the first time.

Such deletion of search results can be aneffective solution against defamation on the net, but it should be noted thatthe Supreme Court of Japan does not have any examples yet recognized. Also inthe judgment of the Supreme Court issued on January 31 this year, deletion hasbeen denied in conclusion.

Also note that as a lower court's tendency,it is said that defamation must be contained in the search result title orsnippet (excerpt of the page itself) itself. Even if the site which is caughtin the search itself has a terrible libelous expression, even if the title orexcerpt displayed as the search result does not contain a libelous expression,currently it seems difficult to delete the search result.

In addition, depending on the judgment ofthe lower court, there is a strict judgment that the deletion is not permittedunless it is obvious from the expression itself that it is non-truthful.According to this judgment, if the honor is damaged by a false statement, it iseasy to prove that it is false, but if it is not known from the defamationexpression itself that it is false, the deletion will not be permitted.

In this way, cases of deletion for searchresults are also limited.

4.   Then, for example, among defamation onthe net,

・A foreign paper company is anadministrator
・The administrator did not accept any deletion
・Title displayed on search result itself and snippet does not includedefamatory expression
In such cases, it is very difficult to take a legal action.

Apart from legal responses, there are alsoso-called SEO countermeasures and anti-SEO countermeasures. These aretechnically an attempt to lower the search ranking of libelous pages, but theinformation of defamation will not disappear.

     More than anything, despite the occurrenceof an illegal event, there is no legal way to respond, which is a very problem. As Japan is a legal nation, it is necessaryto block such loopholes. There should not be such thing that a law - abidingcountry does nothing to solve the problem of such slanderous sites. I hope wewill respond promptly by legislation or justice (in some cases, establishing aninternational cooperation system on deletion of articles).