David McManus says we should set our sights on an uncensored Internet

When Google was forced by the EU to implement new laws around a right to be forgotten it immediately highlighted the problems associated with policing a network that has no international borders.

The law stated that a person can request that the search engine remove links to historic news articles that mention that person if they no longer wish for those stories to be seen. The basic concept behind the idea was that the World Wide Web exists in a sort of perpetually current state; therefore it wasn’t fair that old and potentially embarrassing articles should be dragged up as though they were new.

Google was told that it must include an option for anyone to ask for anything to be removed and that it must comply.

From the moment it was brought in, the new law was an utter farce on so many levels. Although Google was not permitted to reveal full details of any removal request, it did start indicating on search pages that some results had been hidden. These very notices were then subjected to take down requests so you had the ridiculous situation where Google was taking down links to stories about it taking down links to stories.

Another point of contention was the question of just why it should be Google’s responsibility to act as gatekeeper to the web in the first place. The articles themselves remain untouched and can still be viewed if you know where to look. You wouldn’t send out teams of lawyers armed with scissors intent on destroying archived newspaper articles that are stored in libraries.

The concept of tweaking the past to bury historical events sounds like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel. If it was written into law in any other way we would be up in arms, but somehow it is acceptable to remove a record from a database.

But the biggest nonsense of all came from the fact that Google could only be made to comply with a European law inside Europe. Outside of the EU the law has absolutely no meaning and because of the way the internet works, that means web servers that are run from outside the EU are untouched by it.

So a search on google.co.uk may be hiding things that someone has wanted removed, but no such censorship would exist from the exact same search on google.com.

This one simple fact makes the whole thing more of a right to be selectively forgotten and until now nobody had suggested there was any way around it.

Now France’s data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) has said that Google must apply the law to all of its international domains or face huge fines.

To be clear, the CNIL is telling Google how it must conduct its business outside of the EU.

It’s a bold request and one that the company must surely refuse to implement.

As Peter Fleischer, Google’s privacy chief, wrote: “No one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access. In the end, the internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place.”