USA TODAY Column: …In a nonappealable ruling, the European Court of Justice gave individuals the right to redact results on searches of their names — for wrong information, out-of-date information and, it seems too, just unflattering information. This new right — immediately enforceable — presumably extends to politicians, and perhaps corporations, if not governments. In other words, it’s the end pretty much of search as we know it. Or, arguably, it is the end for Europe — serviced by denuded search engines (the ruling applies to all search engines) and kept from knowing what the rest of the world knows.
On the other hand, losing the European search market is rather a big hit on Google as we know it, hegemonically and economically. Indeed, it is a clever model for how authoritarian regimes, long confounded by Google, can bring it to heel — let everybody edit their own search results.
So where are we? Have we reached the limits of a 20-year experiment in information aggregation and access? Or is this one of those cultural snafus that technological advances regularly encounter and inevitably beat down or work around? … (more)
