This past week the has been an usually large amount of government interference with the way people use the Internet. For one, there was Facebook screwing with your emotions. On top of that, we learned that the experiment was actually funded by the U.S. government. Now, we're seeing the effects of the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” policy.
A European court ruled this past May that Google must remove links to articles from its search engine if the respective party has asked them too. The court stated that links could be removed if they were “inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed.” Of course, this ruling received its fair share of backlash, since people can essentially erase important past information about themselves as long as enough time has passed — so if you're Stan O’Neal, the chairman of Merrill Lynch, you can get a negative article about you written by the BBC erased from Google. The article from 2007 titled "Merill's Mess," is now scrubbed from Google in Europe.
The Guardian, too, has said that their stories about powerful people have been deleted from Google search.
This brings into question the involvement of government in media yet again. If they have the power to more or less control what we see, where do they draw the line?
[viaHuffington Post]
