Two years ago today the European Union’s highest court shook the internet when . The Court of Justice means EU residents can ask for search results about them to be removed by going to Google’s , inputting details to verify identity and listing offending results.
Since then Google has assessed to have nearly 1.5 million URLs scrubbed from search results, with a removal rate of around 43 per cent.
Google assesses each claim based on what it can glean about the circumstances and what it thinks the right to be forgotten might mean in the country the request came from.
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Successful requests often involve old, incorrect, or incomplete information, including details relating to crimes and negative reviews, still listed prominently years later when searching under an individual’s name, perhaps hampering job or romantic prospects.
The right, the result of a Spaniard’s legal challenge over an 11-year-old newspaper notice about debt, has now been embraced beyond the EU, including in and . But in the US, while publicly popular according to opinion polls, such a right .
First Amendment
This is in part because the First Amendment is so powerful in American law and in part because US policy views the internet as a neutral tool that efficiently organises the world’s information into a harsh but genuine reality.
Instead, Google instructs US users seeking digital deletion to go to the source of negative personal information. Once gone from the original website, the content purges automatically from search results. Successful removal hinges not on law but on the sympathies of the website operator – a strategy that sometimes works but often does not.
Back in 2010 the American popular press, tech community and scholars were unimpressed when the idea of incorporating a right to be forgotten into EU regulations first took shape. It was described as silly, technologically unfeasible, an insult to history, rights inflation, and downright antiquated in the digital age – in short it would break the internet.
It clearly hasn’t. What’s less clear is if the internet can still be regarded as truly global, that it has not become Balkanised in all but its technical structure – and if this would be a bad thing.
With its international popularity, perhaps eventually the right to be forgotten will be established in the US, but even if it is, such a right will look quite different to the EU ruling.
As national policies and growing concerns about digital information shape the way we experience, understand, and use the internet, we must also find new answers to whether and how the internet should remain global. The right to be forgotten will be central to those answers.
