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Baseless scaremongering by the New Yorker. That's really a new low in American anti-privacy propaganda. The first paragraph alone reads like the kind of parano

Baseless scaremongering by the New Yorker. That's really a new low in American anti-privacy propaganda. The first paragraph alone reads like the kind of paranoia I would expect from the Tea Party. "Google has to scrub any material that a user wants taken down, as long as removing it doesn’t hurt the public interest." It's a lot, a lot more nuanced than that. Also, the EJC is nowhere near the equivalent of the US Supreme Court. The EU is not a federal state. The rest of the article basically goes into a Godwinesque directions, only for this occasion we're using Franco's fascists instead of Hitler's Nazi's.

YokoZar 12y ago
The Spanish high court deferred to the European Court of Justice, and there's no one for them to defer to after that. That makes the Supreme Court analogy pretty apt as far as judicial rulings are concerned in this matter. If you read the entire article, you'll note that the post-Franco era discussion is mostly backstory for how the whole issue of public forgetting is particularly relevant in Spain, and in fact why this test case came from Spain. The article itself then goes on to mention how no fascists have (yet) asked for a Google scrub, however it does imply that someone might eventually try. And it's a good point to raise, as all this "nuance" will require some sort of system of rules and arbitration to decide what is "in the public interest" on a case by case basis. Such a system could be quite burdensome, or prone to abuse. In contrast, countries with strong free speech protections have a rather simple set of rules for when you're allowed to force others to remove true statements from the internet: you dont.
hencq 12y ago
> Also, the EJC is nowhere near the equivalent of the US Supreme Court. The EU is not a federal state. Even though the EU is not a federal state, the decisions of the ECJ still overrule these of member states. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_v_ENEL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_v_ENEL

YokoZar 12y ago

The Spanish high court deferred to the European Court of Justice, and there's no one for them to defer to after that. That makes the Supreme Court analogy pretty apt as far as judicial rulings are concerned in this matter. If you read the entire article, you'll note that the post-Franco era discussion is mostly backstory for how the whole issue of public forgetting is particularly relevant in Spain, and in fact why this test case came from Spain. The article itself then goes on to mention how no fascists have (yet) asked for a Google scrub, however it does imply that someone might eventually try. And it's a good point to raise, as all this "nuance" will require some sort of system of rules and arbitration to decide what is "in the public interest" on a case by case basis. Such a system could be quite burdensome, or prone to abuse. In contrast, countries with strong free speech protections have a rather simple set of rules for when you're allowed to force others to remove true statements from the internet: you dont.

hencq 12y ago

> Also, the EJC is nowhere near the equivalent of the US Supreme Court. The EU is not a federal state. Even though the EU is not a federal state, the decisions of the ECJ still overrule these of member states. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_v_ENEL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_v_ENEL