European Commission criticises Google over BBC link removal
The European Commission has waded into a simmering row over Google’s decision to remove a search link to a BBC blog article by Robert Peston – by describing it as ‘not a good judgement’.
Ryan Heath, spokesperson for the EC vice-president, said he could se no ‘reasonable public interest’ in the article’s removal and stated that the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling – did not give individuals with shady histories the right to ‘Photoshop their lives”.
Heath said: "Google clearly has a strong interest in making sure that they're able to work with whatever the legal requirements are, so they position themselves in a particular way over that.
"It doesn't come cheap to deal with all of these requests, so they need to find some way to come up with dealing with them. It may be that they've decided that it's simply cheaper to just say yes to all of these requests.
"That's going to spark its own debate, and rightly so."
Yesterday Peston penned a blog criticising how his piece commenting on the departure of Merill Lynch banker Stan O’Neal had been targeted for censorship – after being subject to just one of 70,000 takedown requests since the pan-European law was introduced..