Google, the fight to forget, and the right to remember

[Commentary] A major assault on the past is underway in Europe where tens of thousands are seizing on a landmark court ruling to demand Google remove search results they dislike.

As a result, people on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and even within Europe, could soon see very different versions of the Internet as Google’s listings become riddled with blank spaces where information once stood. This is dangerous.

Europe’s past is replete with governments that scrubbed history to suit their own ends. The new Google rules could not only provide a new way for the powerful to purge the past, but also help legitimize censorship in other countries.

This doesn’t mean that there is no place for forgetting or deleting data -- indeed, history also shows that forgetting can be as important to a society as remembering. But the removal rules, as they are now constructed, threaten to do more harm than good.