I think of this as something similar to the ability to expunge court records. It allows people to move on from their mistakes. Of course as everything it can be abused.
People victim of the internet, because they did something bad(or rumor about).
Then shitty "news" pop about it, the victim loose his job, and can't get another one because any other recruiter will type "FirstName Last name" on Google and find article about the rumor.
The internet is not, nor was it ever, intended to provide the world a canonical and immutable record of "history." To claim that deleting content from the internet is tantamount to "deleting history" is absurd.
It's always been legal for a search engine or a website to unpublish or remove content. The only thing the right to be forgotten does is establish that a person has some form of ownership over content that's published about them, and the right to have it removed in some cases.
If you look closely you'll see that your comment doesn't actually contradict or disprove mine. That we as a civilization decided to move the entirety of our cultural output to the house of cards that is the internet is orthogonal to its nature and purpose.
You don't get to arbitrarily decide that now everything on the internet has to be immutable and that no one should have the right to ever delete anything from their servers because "history," or that all personally identifiable information has to be preserved just in case the mobs want to doxx someone in the future.
I'm not saying that it should be illegal to delete anything you want. What I'm saying is that doing so is tantamount to deleting history.
It doesn't matter what was the initial purpose of the internet. What matters is what it has become. The internet is a worldwide (and potentially interplanetary) interconnected public place. You can restrict information all you want but the reality is such that if something went public it's public forever. Every piece of information will be preserved somewhere in the network for as long as the internet exists. It's the reality we leave in.
> What does this even mean?
All of history before the internet is fuzzy. It was easily rewritten by anyone who controlled narrative and sources of information so the actual events or different view points are lost to the history. And as you dig farther into history the fuzzier it becomes. As I said above as long as the internet exists we can obtain different views on events and decide what is most likely happend, what was the reason it happend the way it did, etc. The internet gave us much more different sources of information to preserve history. That's why I said the real history begun with the mass adoption of the internet.