The right to be forgotten

The highest court of the European Union has ruled that Google and other search engines must allow individuals to request that links about them that appear in searches be deleted.

From Google Must Honor Requests to Delete Links, European Court Rules – NYTimes.com:

The highest European court on Tuesday gave individuals the right to influence what can be learned about them through Web searches, rejecting long-established practices about the free flow of information on the Internet.

Before, people who did not like what was being said about them online needed to go the original source of the information and persuade the website to delete it. That was arduous and often impossible. But the European court said the middleman — the search engine — could be asked to simply delete the links.

In some ways, the court is trying to erase the last 25 years, when people learned to routinely Google every potential suitor, partner or friend. In 1990, finding out the true history of a blind date or business collaborator was practically impossible.

“It could result in giving people a line-item veto over results on searches about themselves,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School. “Some will see this as corrupting. Others will see it as purifying.”

[Keep reading. . . ]

So, what do you think?  Is this corrupting or purifying?

Could this right extend to forcing newspapers to delete any negative publicity?  (Remember Winston’s job in 1984 of consigning unwelcome facts to the “memory hole”?)

While people may well love the idea of deleting criticisms, bad reviews, embarrassing information, and any records about their mistakes and transgressions, wouldn’t this amount to re-writing history?  We could all present ourselves as paragons of perfection.  But then why trust any information we would find on the internet?  [I do understand that this ruling would allow content providers to continue to include the information, but the search engines would not be allowed to link to it, effectively burying it.  That would not technically be “deleting” information, but it would be the functional equivalent.]

And is this really technically or logistically feasible?  How can Europe mandate what an American-based internet site can do?  And can Europe demand that Google do something that it doesn’t have to do in America?