Google loses ‘right to be forgotten’ case
This is kind of a trend I&#x27;ve been noticing, where Europe will try to fix a valid technological problem, but pick the most problematic or poorly implemented solution to do it.<p>It&#x27;s not clear to me what the difference is between a government censoring someone directly and a government making it impossible for anyone to find a piece of information. Right to Be Forgotten only works if it becomes prohibitively expensive for a company or individual to locate past articles. So who cares whether or not the original source has been taken down?<p>It&#x27;s not clear to me why it&#x27;s not troubling to European citizens for their government to be in charge of what information is and isn&#x27;t relevant to the public. Whenever I ask people about this, I get the response &quot;well, that&#x27;s why we have courts.&quot; I dunno, Europeans must trust their courts a lot more than I trust mine.<p>It&#x27;s not clear to me why this problem couldn&#x27;t be solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records. If a company gets 90% through the hiring process, runs a background check, and then immediately says &quot;no&quot;, then you sue them.<p>It&#x27;s also not clear to me that this will be enforceable in the future. I consider distributed site indexing to be an unsolved problem, but I don&#x27;t think its <i>unsolvable</i>, and people are actively working on it. If for some crazy reason a distributed web search starts getting used on par with DuckDuckGo in the next 5 years, what do you do about that? Ban the technology?