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European Commission Spokesman: Google Removing Link Was "not a Good Judgement"
An anonymous reader writes in with this article from the BBC about Google's recent removal of a news story from search results. "Google's decision to remove a BBC article from some of its search results was "not a good judgement", a European Commission spokesman has said. A link to an article by Robert Peston was taken down under the European court's "right to be forgotten" ruling. But Ryan Heath, spokesman for the European Commission's vice-president, said he could not see a "reasonable public interest" for the action. He said the ruling should not allow people to "Photoshop their lives". The BBC understands that Google is sifting through more than 250,000 web links people wanted removed."
You understand correctly.
In the American Oligarchy, justice currently means endless retribution, highlighted by driving perceived social misfits into a bottom-feeder class where work, housing and relationships are all truncated, in past years by convention, and today by extensive law.
One cannot attempt to equate Europe's general move towards the public good with the AO's drive to isolate and disadvantage. This country has long enjoyed a stratified class structure. It has gone so far as to abandon its constitutional underpinnings to see to it that formal stratification and restricted access has become law. The general attitude is that there is no social disadvantage too extreme to heap on the bowed back of any citizen who has not complied with the prejudices of the day, who commits a crime of any significance whatsoever, or who attempts to undertake asserting consensual, informed choice with or without like-minded companions.
In the AO, the attitude is one of not caring in the least for one's fellow citizen, and certainly not if said citizen has actually acted out in any way. You can see it in the extreme resistance to taking care of its poorer citizens (The AO is one of the last "developed" nations to actually acknowledge the otherwise obvious fact that a healthy population is a strong basis for a strong economy); You can see it in the willingness to export jobs outside the country, leaving the poorer citizens without work; You can see it in the "never forgive, never forget" nature of the justice system; You can see it in the horrific conditions across the country's prison systems; You can see it in the numerous "services" that allow us to scan the lives of our fellow citizens and uncover everything from minor peccadilloes to serious breaches of the law; and you can see it in the rapid erosion of the constitutional principles that were supposed to restrain the government from intruding on the lives of the citizens in the first place.
Europe is by no means perfect. There are many laws that criminalize acts that should be no business of the government. But it seems clear that there is little attempt to intentionally lock out the citizenry who have run ins with the law on a permanent basis -- such class stratification isn't even on the table. This is somewhat ironic, given that this region is where dukes, earls, kings and queens were (and in a sort of faded, ghostly way, still are) the actual government structure. Perhaps it is this very experience with formal stratification that reminds Europeans that one person, after all, really isn't that much better than the next.
On this July 4th, perhaps citizens of the AO should take a moment to regret the country's failure to tread the path its founders laid out for it. Although that would take time from the barbecue, reducing the overall opportunity to gossip about who is on what list, the *nerve* of some *felon* trying to actually get a decent job, and "those druggies" down the street who actually Smoke Pot. I suppose we can't have that.
I'm sure the average citizen won't even recognize what I'm saying here; the nationalist nature of the AO spirit, exceptionalism and disdain for any way not their own serves as a powerful set of blinders. But I am also sure that historians will spend no time arguing about the fact of the AO; the contention will only be about exactly when the country lost its way, mutating from a constitutional republic where equality was a key underpinning of the national consciousness, into an oligarchy where corporations bought law designed to benefit themselves, while laws enabling and formalizing inequality were the meat and potatoes of political rhetoric from election to election.
Well, here's the thing. Just as with buggy whips and street vendors who pushed carts around offering knife-sharpening services, there is no guarantee that any business will remain viable in the face of social and/or technological change. Google's blind assumption that it can do anything it wants with any information it can access was a massive overreach from day one. It has led to many highly objectionable behaviors. For example, forcing all participants in its Google Base product to remove copyright information from original images produced at cost such that their competitors are handed the benefit of the images while the originator bears the costs; such as outrageously violating copyright by scanning entire books without acquiring the related rights; such as scanning email and other information as their street view vehicles pass by people's homes and businesses; etc.
It may be that a critical underpinning of Google's business model is in the process of being rejected by a significant portion of the world community; should that fully materialize, it will just as you say leave them with two choices. But they are much more fundamental: boiling down to adapt, or die.
You can only heap abuse on people just so deep before awareness turns into action. Americans, and Google, have only themselves to blame for this finger pointing fest they enjoy so much. The rest of the world has no obligation to stoop so low as to participate in it. Google may find itself, by international law, reduced to the "US Search Engine." I'm not at all sure that would be a bad thing, either. It seems quite appropriate that those who most enjoy finger pointing should have their very own tools to do so without bringing this odious habit to the rest of the world in the form of fiat. Just because the USA is run by corporate and moneyed interests doesn't mean the rest of the world has to operate the same way.