European court ruling continues to vex Google
In the wake of the European Court of Justice ruling that Google had to address individuals’ “Right to be Forgotten” online, the company has already had over 70,000 takedown requests. Google has begun dealing with requests and pulling things down, including links to articles in British publications, while others were brought back after uproar.
One major issues is that these thousands of takedown requests are targeted geographically.
“When a request is granted to have a search result de-linked from someone’s name, that delinking will only take place in the localized Europe-based versions of the Google search engine,” says Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
According to Zittrain, both the ECJ decision and the Facebook experiment are two sides of the same coin — In both, the question is tinkering with online streams of content. In the case of Facebook, people objected to the idea that humans are hand-tweaking the feed, which is essentially what the ECJ decision asks for more of from Google.
Says Zittrain: “There’s going to be many hands on that tiller for search results, and we might have been better off with the roulette wheel.”
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