[mike_hearn]

I live in Europe, was born in Britain, and I think this is a bad ruling that makes the EU look like a bad joke.

Laws that can only be enforced by building a massive system of internet censorship akin to China's are indeed "doing it wrong".

Happy now?

[krbbltr]

You're entitled to your opinion, but a single comment on a US-centric discussion forum does not convince me that it's a majority opinion as far as Europeans go. My observations so far indicate the opposite.

[Fuxy]

As a European myself the request of the citizen for the removal of the content was legitimate you can't have past problems looming over you your entire life and certain things are just too personal and shouldn't be so easy to find to begin with.

I don't want a potential google search to reveal I got my home repossessed for instance.

The employer could take advantage of this by offering you a lower wage since you're desperate it's more likely you will take it or not hire you at all.

However the way the court choose to handle this was completely wrong. This shouldn't be handled at search engine level but at the publishing website level.

The ability of anybody requesting content to be removed from the internet should be very limited in the types of things they can have removed and rigorously monitored by a court of law.

Plus there should be a private database containing the Names of the people who had content removed and what was removed.

That would discourage political reasons since the log of their activity exists even if the content doesn't.

[mike_hearn]

What about the right of the employer to know who they're about to employ?

If someone claims to be an expert in a certain area which you need but are not yourself an expert in, it would be very useful to be able to search their name and discover that things they wrote about the topic have been discredited. It'd be even more useful if you could find unflattering opinions about them written by their peers: perhaps it avoids a very long and messy employment of someone who will then be difficult to fire, but who doesn't know what they're doing, potentially crippling your business.

The guy you're looking at would probably love to make the criticism of his work unfindable whilst simultaneously leaving behind the bits that make him look good. But why should he have that right? Employers have needs too.

For what it's worth I quite agree that the existing framework for getting things removed from the internet (by going to the source) works well enough, but that's not what the court has now created.

[mike_hearn]

But haven't you just been assuming that anyone who is against this ruling is American?

[krbbltr]

Generally, no, I have not. That preachy, self-righteous subset of Americans I was referring to is usually very easy to tell apart from concerned Europeans. Which to be sure I've seen as well, but in much lower quantities.

And to be clear, I don't actually have much of an opinion on whether the immediate consequences of the ECJ ruling will be positive or negative ones for EU citizens. My issue is mainly with the way this topic was and is reported on in some of the US media – lots of fear mongering and misrepresentation of facts by mainstream press and high-profile bloggers alike. It smells like a PR campaign. (The completely unreflected freedom-of-speech-as-a-religion type forum commenter is really just a consequence and an extension of that.)

Larry Page happily confirms that suspicion. From the article:

“I wish we’d been more involved in a real debate . . . in Europe. That’s one of the things we’ve taken from this, that we’re starting the process of really going and talking to people” - Larry Page

Translation: "This whole ordeal made us realize we need to do a lot more lobbying in Europe and pay off more media outlets in non-english language markets, since our propaganda there didn't work nearly as well as we had hoped. Don't worry, we're working on it."

At the core of the ECJ decision – whether you consider it good or bad, or hilarious, or plain stupid – lie important questions about what privacy and human dignity mean in this age and how much of them we're willing to give up. These questions deserve more than being drowned in the overwhelming noise of corporate shills.