The Digital Millennium Copyright Act contained provisions that limited, but did not eliminate,
Google’s liability for listing or linking to third-party websites that included materials
that infringed copyrights or other rights, so long as the company complied with the statutory
requirements of the act. Various U.S. and international laws restricted the distribution of
materials considered harmful to children and imposed additional restrictions on the ability of online services to collect information from minors. Furthermore, in the area of data protection,
many states had passed laws requiring notification to users when there was a security breach
of personal data. One example was California’s Information Practices Act.8