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There's no threat at all to either freedom of speech or the press.

If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun.

It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech.

Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, but it then would likely no longer be for the public good or interest, it would merely be vindictive.

Unless, of course, you don't believe in redemption or rehabilitation.



"It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards"

I'm fairly sympathetic to the "right to be forgotten", but this Guardian article does raise some troubling questions about exactly how it is going to work. Two of the things it mentions being hidden from Google results are from 2011 and 2010. Is that "years afterwards"? Is three years so long ago that the information is genuinely irrelevant?


It is most definitely censorship, even if delayed. For example, book burning is pretty hard to defend, and the books burned were likely written many months and years before they were burned.


Today's BBC article thoroughly disproves your point: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581

Freedom of press is about creating a public record. When you remove that record from the public, when you censor the past of public discourse, you've infringed on free speech. Real discourse is full of [citation needed], and if you can preemptively remove those citations, there will be cheating.


And yet those [citation needed]s haven't disappeared. I can and do still find them using duck duck go and Bing. Information will be free. There's an agenda at play here because I can't imagine how the people behind this law couldn't have foreseen this. I wonder whether Google is being set up because of its market-dominating position. If not, why weren't the other search engines similarly constrained?


> If not, why weren't the other search engines similarly constrained?

They are if they operate in the EU.

But there's no universal place to submit takedown requests. People would also have to send them to Bing (according to this article DDG doesn't operate at all in the EU so is not subject to the ruling).


It reminds me of 1984, where the party is perpetually rewriting history to fit their narrative. This is it, history is being rewritten.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past


It is absolutely a restriction on freedom of speech to tell Google that it can't mention the very existence of various Guardian and BBC articles.


> Unless, of course, you don't believe in redemption or rehabilitation.

Neither of which have anything to do with a "true" reputation.


freedom of historical reports?

If we lose that one we are truly fucked.




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