July 23, 2015 4:00pm by David Farrar

280,000 reasons why it was such a bad court ruling

I’ve been working with NPR to discuss a number of the week. This time it’s 280,000 — that’s the number of requests individuals in Europe have made to Google so far asking the company to remove certain web pages from its search results.

The number of requests has been consistently climbing since May 2014, when the European Court of Justice ruled that an Internet search engine has to consider such requests from a person about search results related to that person’s name.

This just degrades the usefulness of search engines, if 280,000 people can get information on them suppressed in the results.

In my view it was a terrible ruling by the European Court of Justice, and I hope we never get anything like that here.