So the big story bouncing around every tech outlet this week is the European court ruling against Google, the one everyone's already started calling "right to be forgotten." I'm not going to do the whole rundown here because if you've glanced at literally any tech site since Tuesday you've already got the gist: the Court of Justice of the European Union sided with a Spanish guy, Mario Costeja Gonzalez, who'd been trying for years to get Google to stop surfacing a 1998 newspaper notice about a debt and a house auction whenever someone searched his name. The court said yes, under EU data protection rules search engines count as "data controllers," and individuals can ask them to delist results that are inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive, even when the original page stays up untouched.
What I actually want to talk about is smaller than that, and probably more relevant to the eleven or so people who read this blog regularly.
I've had this thing running since November 2011. Almost three years now, which feels insane to type out. In that time I've written close to four hundred posts, and a bunch of them mention real people by name. Not celebrities, just people. A guy who ran a coworking space I used for six months in 2012 and got a mildly critical post out of me. A developer I interviewed over email for a piece about early Node stuff, who said some things he probably wouldn't want attached to his name two years later. My own cousin, actually, in a post about a garage sale we ran together, which I'm fairly sure shows up on page one if you search his name, mostly because there isn't much else out there about him.
None of that is defamatory or even really unkind. It's just old, and specific, and mine, and it exists because I run a small independent blog on a shared hosting plan that costs me about four bucks a month, not because I work for a newspaper with an editorial policy and a legal department standing behind me.
The ruling as written only touches search engines, not the original publisher, so in theory this doesn't come for my blog directly. Google is the one who'd have to pull the link, not me. But that distinction feels thinner than it looks once you sit with it. If a search engine delists a page for someone's name, the page is still there, sure, technically, sitting on my server getting maybe two visits a year from people who found the exact URL some other way. Functionally it's gone. Nobody finds a thing they can't search for.
I keep going back and forth on how I feel about the whole thing, which I know isn't a very satisfying position for a blog post, but here's the actual opinion part: I think it's good that people have some recourse against a company that has, by accident of being enormously successful, become the de facto public record for basically everyone alive. Costeja Gonzalez didn't ask the newspaper to take the notice down. He asked Google to stop being the mechanism that made an old resolved debt the first thing anyone learned about him. That seems reasonable to me, and I say that as someone who makes a hobby out of writing things about other people on the internet.
What I don't love is that Google is now the one who has to decide, request by request, what counts as excessive or irrelevant, presumably with some team making judgment calls on stuff a judge should probably be making instead. There's no form live yet as far as I've seen, no published process, just a ruling and a company that has to build one from scratch on a timeline nobody at Google agreed to. That's a strange amount of power to hand a search company, even one I personally use forty times a day without thinking twice about it.
While I'm on the subject of companies with too much leverage over how information moves around, I noticed Alibaba filed its IPO paperwork with the SEC last week too, which barely made a ripple next to this ruling but is probably the bigger long-term story if you care about who ends up running the pipes e-commerce runs through. Different post, another day maybe.
If you run anything with your own name on it and other people's names scattered through the archives, which, if you've been blogging since 2011 like I have, is basically everything you've ever written, this is worth keeping half an eye on. Not because anyone's coming for my garage sale post. But because the rule for how searchable a person's past is just changed, and nobody voted on it, it just got decided in a courtroom in Luxembourg on a Tuesday.