Search Engine Land

[Commentary] There are plenty of good intentions with the EU’s Right To Be Forgotten mandate, as well as Google’s attempt to meet new obligations under it. Things are still going to hell regardless.

To date, according to new stats Google gave the Guardian, Google says it has received more than 70,000 requests to remove about 275,000 individual listings, with most requests coming from France, Germany, the UK, Spain and Italy, in that order. Currently, about 1,000 requests per day are coming in.

The European Court felt that anyone in the EU should have the right to ask for material to be removed if they consider it to be “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive,” to cite the EU’s fact sheet about the ruling. Those simple criteria belie some difficult decisions. How exactly does someone decide what’s inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive? How do you make this determination balanced against another fundamental EU right, the public’s right for access to information?

Make no mistake. Google didn’t want to have to the type of censorship now being imposed upon it by the EU. It fought the initial case. But Google has been complying with the new right, and faster than its competitors. Where Google has gone wrong, in my opinion, is in complying with the right by actually making decisions itself about whether something should be removed. It didn’t have to do that. It could be -- and should be -- rejecting every one of these requests as a judgment call that it shouldn’t be making.