Google has no choice but to yield to a landmark ruling to honor individuals' "right to be forgotten" on the Internet, but not without warning that the court may be doing a disservice to startups while encouraging repressive regimes around the world to further repress free speech.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Google chief executive Larry Page said the decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union ordering Google and other search engines to comply with requests to take down individuals' irrelevant or outdated personal information could be harmful to startups, which will have to deal with a "significant new layer of regulatory complexity" that could have hurt Google when it was still "three people in a garage."
"We're a big company and we can respond to these kind of concerns and spend money on them and deal with them, it's not a problem," Page tells the Financial Times. "But as a whole, as we regulate the Internet, I think we're not going to see the kind of innovation we've seen."
Page also argued that the court's un-appealable decision could serve as a precedent for other governments to implement or fortify censorship.
"It will be used by other governments that aren't as forward and progressive as Europe to do bad things. Other people are going to pile on, probably ... for reasons most Europeans would find negative," he cautions.
Still, Google's chief admitted that his company has been caught off guard by the latest ruling and promised that Google will step up its level of engagement over privacy issues in Europe, which has generally stricter privacy rules than in the U.S.
"I wish we'd been more involved in a real debate ... in Europe. That's one of the things we've taken from this, that we're starting the process of really going and talking to people," he says. "We're trying now to be more European and think about it maybe more from a European context."
Google hopes to strike a balance between removing search results that link to untruthful information about a person or information about one-time shameful acts from the past and protecting the public's right to information of public interest, such as news articles about a politician's corrupt activities. This could prove to be a moral dilemma for Google, and a logistically challenging one at that.
To help it sort out the implications and practicalities, Google is setting up a committee composed of senior Google officials and outside experts that will conduct hearings in Europe and advise the company on how to conduct its court-mandated responsibilities. Members of the committee include Google co-founder and former chief executive Eric Schmidt, Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, ethics professor Luciano Floridi of the Oxford Internet institute, law school director of Leuven University Peggy Velcke, U.N. envoy on freedom of expression Frank La Rue, and former director of the Spanish data protection agency Jose Luis Pinar.
Google also posted a web form that users can use to send requests for the removal of links as part of its "initial effort" to comply with the ruling, but the search engine says it will work with data protection authorities to improve the form.
