Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales lashes out at EU ruling on "right to be forgotten"
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s entire mission statement is freedom of information, and so far, he’s been very successful at protecting that right.
Unfortunately, as much as we would love to live in an idealistic world where justice is equal and fair, the reality is that every right is bound to infringe somebody else’s right. This is where the controversy stems from. It’s a matter of perspective.
On one side of the spectrum, we have Mario Costeja González, a man with a past and his quest to erase that past... or at least hide it really well. Ironically, that past is now public domain.
On the other side, we have Google, a search engine giant on a mission to make public information available to all.
“As far as I know, this is unprecedented, It is certainly shocking to have come from the EU rather than from an authoritarian state.” states Jimmy Wales during an interview with the Atlantic.
Wales has a point, in that if Google indeed folds and agrees to satisfy every link deletion request, we can expect this right extended not only to private citizens, but also to corporations, foreign governments, and other entities likely to take advantage of this ruling and use it as a political, or criminal weapon.
“I do not know of any similar case where on the one hand a government publishes information, and on the other hand punishes telling people where to read it. Suppose, as seems likely due to the noise in this case, the legal and truthful information that Google is supposed to suppress is repeated in major news sources, blogs, tweets, Is Google required to start censoring large swathes of the web? Are they required to build a complex censorship engine to block true information that a court has ruled must not be linked to? It’s crazy.” Jimmy Wales goes on commenting.
The United States will most probably not be affected by this ruling, yet it’s unclear how this precedent will affect all future rulings in Europe, or in other countries run by governments who might find such state of affair desirable.