Thanks very much Mario Costeja, but we won’t be forgetting you any time soon…

Sometimes the courts get it wrong. And when they do, they create absurd laws and precedents that then oblige us to examine what we all stand to lose when they are applied. In this case we’re dealing with something very serious, something that could change the nature of the internet as we know it: the right to obtain true information that has not been filtered.

There is probably information out there attributed to every one of us, or about us, which is factually incorrect. I would like very much to get rid of quite a few pages that I don’t think do me justice, published either in error or maliciously. Some of it could probably even be reported to the police. But I am not prepared to pursue the matter, because I understand that what a search engine needs to do is search. If the information should not be there, I can go to the source and get them to remove it, but what I would never do is go to whoever indexes the material, because all they are doing is indexing what already exists.

As a search engine user myself, what I value is being able to find whatever is out there on the internet, the whole of the internet, about this or that subject, or this or that person. The value proposal of that search engine is severely reduced if all it can offer me is what somebody else has decided should be…