Before delving into a view on the case for a "right" to be "forgotten", I want to touch on some points about the article, the legal aspect, and some meta points.

Regarding the article, I disagree with the "evil corporation" test, and also disagree with the "unremarkable person" test. These test seems too specialised, and too representative of a particular worldview, to be of general applicability or usefulness.

Legally, it is an exciting and fascinating case, and really emblematic of the present. Given their history, it's cool that France is the nexus where this is going on. I'm fascinated to see what the courts adjudicate and what the enforcement results are.

At a meta level, making regard to Google's strategy, if I ran Google, I would never ever have given in to any of this, because as I will come to, this is not really about a “right to be forgotten at all.” Europe wants to censor our search results? Ignore. Europe threatens fines? Ignore. Europe makes some effective threat? Respond with a threat to shutter Google services for Europe, and market it, just to further incent the populist outrage, as adhering to principles of freedom for individuals and anti-state censorship ( as they did in China, even tho that decision was, because of different reasons, incorrect ). Then see where the regulators loyalties are, with the “cause of a lifetime” or with their soon to be rescinded tenure?

The antitrust case, and now this, it worked for Google to never have budged an inch on either of these things, but because the legal advice they listened to was all cowardice, they did. A reason contributing to the workability of an unflinching attitude for Google is that this is not really about a “right to be forgotten” for individuals at all, it is really about a “right for Europe to forget the reason their tech sector failed to produce a Google”.

Europe is bitter, that an American company has, again, taken over the world, and left “poor Europe” with the scraps. Rather than owning this, the Europeans would rather pretend that Google has done something wrong, so they can pretend that their failure was, in fact, the result of some injustice perpetrated against them by what they delude themselves is an evil corporation. Europe indulges this fantasy of victimization instead of owning their failure and creating improvements to make their tech sector work. Obviously their attitude is self-defeating and their delusion isn’t helping them create any improvements. It is giving them the fake pay off of pretending they are righteous fake victims of an “evil”, American company, that they feel in their delusion is “too successful to be moral”.

Because the antitrust case and now this is driven by Europe’s meta desire for a catharsis from owning responsibility for its economic impotence, Google should never have aided Europe in indulging their fantasy of victimization. It doesn’t help Europe, and it doesn’t help Google, because, as Ivan Vanko in Iron Man II says, “If you could make God bleed, people would cease to believe in Him. There will be blood in the water, the sharks will come. All I have to do is sit back and watch as the world consumes you.” Europe is poking the Googlebear because Europe, like Ivan, incorrectly blames Google for its own legacy of failure, and is now obsessed with fabricating a narrative that fake justifies their crusade against the American giant.

To paraphrase Tony Stark, “Where will you be watching the world consume me from? Oh, that's right, economic meltdown. I'll send you a food voucher.”

Google should never have budged because there now is blood in the water, and Europe has found a weakness.

To get even more meta, Europe actually was testing Google’s strength. Is Google strong enough to be an inspiration for leadership here, to us? If Google had showed true backbone, and said, “No, this is ridiculous,” Europe would have stepped back, confident they were in the presence of something that really deterministically knew what it was doing, take off their hats, bowed, and said, “Okay, Google, show us the way.” This would have led to greater integration and European collaboration with Google, which would have been great for everybody. Unfortunately, Google caved at the crucial moment, a trend that is disappointingly common in present-day American leadership.

Moving now to the actual ethics, I think there are two basic principles under contention in a case for a “right to be forgotten” :

1) does anyone ( beside the state, which is fine ) have the right to control the contents of another's mind?

2) what information about a thing ( person, company, entity ) is it lawful to keep secret ?

The answer to the first is no, no one has a right to control the contents of anyone else’s mind beside their own. Every person has perfect mental freedom to discover, learn, think and believe whatever they choose or whatever random chance leads them to. This is obviously to say nothing of expressing those beliefs, or creating consequences from those beliefs in the world. These latter two things are ignored in this present discussion.

The answer to the second is important to define. Some things are lawful to keep secret, and laws are already being or have been introduced to protect people in these cases ( such as the privacy of clinical information, the illegality of “revenge porn”, “sealed” legal proceedings, trade secrets, financial information of private companies, information that incites terrorist violence ( in Britain, at last ), and other things ). There is a lot of scope here for creating improvements, and likely a lot of future caselaw to adjudicate what different places mores and standards are about these things.

So, in light of this, and in light of the internet being a “public space”, and in light of Google being a major gateway to access information, it’s clear that there are __some__ things which are lawful to keep private, and illegal to publish publicly, and therefore, if they have appeared on the internet, have appeared on the internet illegally, and therefore are subject to similar treatment as now effected by DMCA takedown requests. So there is a right to remove some of these things, and that is simply the normal legal apparatus also finding the expression of its effects on the Internet. These things are not legal off the internet, and eventually the law will enforce them on the internet as well. In time, the coordination to strike a balance between different jurisdictions will lead to some “enclaves of permissiveness and iniquity” and also some new cooperative legislation between different jurisdictions to work together to remove illegal content.

So the basic consideration here is that while no one can limit what an individual puts into their head, there are some things that it is not legal to publish, and so in effect, individuals will not be able to put them into their heads.

Calling it a “right to be forgotten” is really just abstruse, and incorrect. You can’t force someone to forget something particular ( unless Eternal Sunshine is real ), and you can’t really even force the internet to forget. You can make some types of information illegal, and effect their removal or prevent their display. Practically tho, just as you can not unsay something said, nor put the dropped tumbler back together in the same way, you can’t rewind thermodynamics and you can never remove information once you have unleashed it online. All you can do, is limit the fallout, and try to limit the scope of dissemination, and try to dissuade people from releasing in the first place. One of the things this difficulty of enforcement suggests is that the penalties, when they are written, will come down on the side of being exaggeratedly deterrent, since their excess must compensate for the lack of a preventative complement.