Frankly, the only perspective I care about in this mess is mine - that of a non-EU Google user. I'm only reasoning from Google's because I want to understand ho

Frankly, the only perspective I care about in this mess is mine - that of a non-EU Google user. I'm only reasoning from Google's because I want to understand how these EU regulations are likely to impact me. Now that EU regulators are making it clear they won't be satisified by compliance tailored to their jurisdiction, it's clear that they will. Which is just wrong. There's no sensible reason for EU regulations to have anything to do with the search results that I (as a non-EU citizen, searching from outside the EU, most likely using entirely non-EU servers, network connections and so on) see. I agree that the EU has the economic and political power to impose these regulations (on Google, Bing, Yahoo, ...). I just think that, even though they can, they shouldn't. This is exactly the same sort of extraterritorial bullshit that drives the EU (and EU citizens) nuts when the US does it. See, for example, the US government demanding, from Microsoft, the emails of EU citizens stored on EU servers in response to a US search warrant. Or the volumes of requirements (tax monitoring, sanctions compliance and so on) the US imposes on non-US banks even when their only US connection is they sometimes transfer dollars between non-US customers. EU citizens and EU regulators might care deeply about the "right to be forgotten", but if they think that endorsing and emulating the US's extraterritorial grandstanding in its name is going to be anything but a gigantic net loss for European privacy, they're kidding themselves, at best. Google's response to the "right to be forgotten" has been disappointing and frustrating (though I doubt we'd agree on why). What similarly powerful governments (e.g. US, China, ...) end up doing with the new tools the EU is forging to enforce that right will be terrifying.