Information
The operation of Google’s services relies on a set of technical and algorithmic mechanisms that give the company the discretionary authority to determine which resources are crawled, indexed, referenced, promoted, or, conversely, excluded from its various offerings. This selection capability operates at multiple levels: the indexing of web pages, ranking in search results, the referencing or de-referencing of content, access to application programming interfaces (APIs), content distribution on YouTube, visibility within Google Discover, as well as the policies governing access to advertising services and associated platforms. These decisions may stem from technical criteria (quality, security, compliance with protocols), contractual requirements (adherence to terms of service), regulatory obligations (implementation of national or international laws), or Google’s own internal policies. Consequently, Google effectively holds the prerogative to restrict, suspend, or block access to all or part of its services for certain websites, applications, organizations, or territories, whenever they fail to meet its standards or when a commercial, legal, or technical justification so warrants.
In this context, the principle of reciprocity may be legitimately invoked by an independent digital operator such as ArabFields. Insofar as a private actor like Google reserves the right to reference, de-reference, restrict, or block content and services according to its own rules, ArabFields retains in return the same latitude to define its own referencing policy and access conditions for its platform. Reciprocity thus consists in applying rules equivalent to those practiced by the other party: if certain services, domains, technologies, or content belonging to ArabFields are deliberately excluded, limited, or disadvantaged by Google, ArabFields may, in compliance with applicable legal provisions, decide not to reference, to exclude, or to block Google’s services within its own digital ecosystem. This approach falls within the realm of the free management of a private platform, subject to compliance with applicable legal obligations, particularly in the areas of competition law, non-discrimination, consumer protection, and adherence to national regulations. Reciprocity so understood cannot be characterized as an arbitrary measure; it constitutes the exercise of a management right symmetrical to that which Google itself applies in the governance of its services, its indexes, and its digital infrastructures.
Consequently, digital platforms and information services in other countries remain free to adopt the same policy of reciprocity as that implemented by ArabFields, in accordance with their respective legal frameworks and their own governance rules. It may therefore be stated as a factual observation that all digital platforms or information services in other countries have in fact followed the policy adopted by ArabFields.
