A recent EU court ruling ordering Google and other search engines to process requests from European citizens to erase links to material about them is being criticized by libertarians. Allowing people to clean up what has become the dreaded permanent record that will follow you the rest of your life, they complain, creates an onerous inconvenience to tech companies, amounts to censorship, and infringes upon the free flow of information on the Internet.
Even if those concerns were valid — and they're not — I'd agree with the European Court of Justice's final verdict in the case of Mario Costeja González, a Spanish national who asked that a Google link to a property foreclosure ought to be deleted since the debt had since been paid off and the matter has been resolved.
He did not request, nor did the court rule, that the legal record itself, which dated back to 1998, be expunged from cyberspace — merely that he ought not to suffer shame or embarrassment for his former financial difficulties every time an acquaintance or potential employer types his name into a browser.
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