The lack of existing legal procedure is exactly the problem with this law. You are putting the responsibility of weighing people's right to privacy vs others rights to a free press in the hands of some Google paralegal, who have to decide, under threat of potential lawsuits, without any possibility for the publisher to respond. That is fucking terrifying precendent, and it baffles me that people can't see the enormous abuse potential.
Google is doing it
precisely to undermine the law. That is their modus operandi. They've done a similar "Don't blame us, we're forced to do this (except not really), blame them" approach in other cases, e.g. GEMA. They may very well be deliberately removing results that, by the very ruling, should not have to be removed. They are not the paragon of free speech they pretend to be.
I also find it kind of amusing that people consider 'fighting Google's power' to mean 'give Google the authority and responsibility to censor the internet with no court order'.
That is an enormous amount of power you are putting in the hands of a massive corporation.
They already have that power. They can do whatever they want. No one outside is controlling them. No one outside can look into how they obtain their results. I'd also stress that this is in no way any violation of free speech. Free speech doesn't mean that whatever you said must (be allowed) to show up in a search engine result.
This law/ruling is about giving people a legal basis to remove results, although there is no legal framework for it yet. It is about giving search engine operators the obligation to respect privacy and demands responsibility of them.
I think this would be self explanatory, but obviously Google would bend to regulation, even unreasonable regulation, before pulling out of the entire Eurozone.
They are a business first and foremost, their existence depends on an endless stream of ad revenue.
It is not self expanatory, because it is nonsensical. I've pointed out that there has been global censorship for many years, that Google already filters results in ways we cannot check or control, that many companies (for whatever reasons) actively filter content.
The idea that giving people, not countries or companies, the right to fight search engine results, under significant restrictions and currently without legal framework/procedure, would end global search is utterly ludicrous. If Google is a paragon of free speech, ignoring that they already censor results, they can simply leave that country.
I have a serious problem with the idea that I could perform a search on a corrupt Italian politician, an English child-abusing MP, a FIFA official accused of taking bribes in Zurich, or a French nationalist who wrote some unfortunate editorials about the blight of modern Islam, and come up blank because a European court ruled that these results aren't relevant or are actively harmful to the party who claims they have "moved on".
This is not an all-encompassing "Remove whatever you want" right, no matter how often you or others repeat this lie. This right does not stand above all else, but is embedded in European law and significantly restricted, e.g. by public interest. If such a link has been removed by Google so far, it is because they chose to. You have no one to blame but Google then.
I find it baffling that people have no problem with a company intransparently controlling search results, but a legal framework for people to defend themselves against such companies is treated like the end of the world.
If a country has a law that blasphemy is not allowed and bans it from search locally, would you then defend Google removing all results internationally just to ensure that country's citizens are forever protected from that content? That's the kind of precedence this sets, it will never just be about rape accusations and nude pictures.
How does giving individuals a legal right to fight search engine results
within the constraints of European law set in any way a precent for a country forcing Google to remove blasphemy?
It's not Google's job to curate the internet to make people not feel bad. Giving them that kind of discretion is far more frightening than any potential loss of privacy...which is an illusion in the era where every government is reading everything you put on the web every single day.
This is about Google taking responsibility and giving people a legal right to fight search engine results. They don't get to control search engine results without legal responsibility.
Quite frankly this is Google's fault then for giving in to de-listing requests too hastily. This is why we would need judicial review and monitoring by civil rights bodies, in case of an application of this ruling. Though that still would not be ideal.
It is almost as if this enormous, rich company (with presumably a large legal department) was trying to discredit this law/right....
