Europe wants Right to be forgotten imposed on Google searches in the US too

The European courts have been very supportive of the right to be forgotten on the Internet since last year. This unique right allows Europeans to demand that search engines should remove links in search results that lead to news stories and other inaccurate information about them that they don’t want to be discovered. Now, according to a recent demand by the French regulators, Google should start censoring its results not only in Europe but also in the US. After the request, Google has started to work on censoring the search results in US, that is, unless the Obama administration chooses to intervene. Right to be forgotten was initially put forward by the European Union’s Court of Justice when it ordered Google to remove links to news stories in search results about a Spanish lawyer who complained about factual reporting on his troubled finances.

The court had ordered Google to get rid of the links that were inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant and were excessive. The court had also agreed that the articles on the lawyer were a violation of his privacy and should be taken down. With the right to be forgotten in place, people will no longer be able to get hold of the information that is already available on the Internet, but is hidden from them. Does it not contradict the whole basic idea of Internet?

Currently, Google is deleting articles only from its European versions, such as French Google.fr and German Google.de. However, the information was still accessible to the people who were outside Europe like in the US. In June, the French regulators ordered Google to remove the stories from their International version that is used by the Americans. Even though 97 per cent of searches in France employ the French version of Google, this did not hold back the European Courts from demanding a clean sweep of links from the international version. In its defense, Google argued,” there are innumerable examples around the world where content that is declared illegal under the law of one country would be deemed legal in others.” They cited the examples of Thailand making it illegal to criticize the king and Turkey’s criminalizing some political speech and Russia’s banning of what it calls Gay propaganda.

Europe should have the censored Internet if they want it but it is up to the Americans and the Obama Administration to step up and fight against Europe’s demand that Internet should be censored in America too even if the US does not want it.

Image Courtesy: Spiegel