Canada’s Supreme Court Wednesday upheld a ruling against Google Inc. ordering the tech giant to de-list entire domains and websites from its search index, raising the hackles of free-speech advocates.

The case, Google v. Equustek, goes back to 2011 when British Columbia-based Equustek Solutions filed a complaint with the Supreme Court of British Columbia. It accused a group known as the Datalink defendants of selling counterfeit Equustek products online.

Equustek won the case on a default judgment because the defendants were in absentia during court proceedings. Google initially said it would remove 345 URLs directly related to the counterfeit products and ads under the Google.ca domain.

The court then granted an injunction ordering Google to take down all search results worldwide to any Datalink websites. Google appealed the injunction at the Supreme Court of Canada, but the court upheld the decision despite Google’s assertion that such a ruling was an attack on freedom of expression.

In its ruling the court defended its actions stating that Google is a global company and in this case the only way to uphold the injunction was to apply the law where Google operates, which is worldwide. The court also said that the decision could be overturned once the intellectual property issues were cleared.

Addressing free-speech concerns, the court said the decision was “not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values. We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods.”

The ruling has sparked fears over what critics have alluded to as the strong-arm of global censorship. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said the Equustek decision was part of a “troubling trend” in which courts and governmental bodies can have content removed not only locally, but from the entire Internet.

Canadian law professor Michael Geist, who holds the position of Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, wrote in a post, “What happens if a Chinese court orders it to remove Taiwanese sites from the index? Or if an Iranian court orders it to remove gay and lesbian sites from the index? Since local content laws differ from country to country, there is a great likelihood of conflicts.”

Geist concluded by saying the Canadian Supreme Court had just made a decision that empowers courts globally to assert jurisdiction over the Internet worldwide.

In a statement, Google said it’s “carefully reviewing the Court’s findings and evaluating our next steps.”

Image: Kristina Alexanderson via Flickr