Google is being inundated by a flood of removal requests. About 70,000 removal requests concerning nearly 270,000 different web pages have been received so far, with around 1,000 new requests coming in each day, according to Google.
The company has hired an army of paralegals to vet every web address before deciding whether to strip links from its search engine. In all cases, the original web pages remain untouched. So far Google has not disclosed how much cash it is spending on this process.
Google has begun reinstating links to newspaper stories it had scrubbed from its search engine only days before, A series of links to articles in the Guardian newspaper that were suppressed by the search engine earlier in the week were reinstated on Thursday after the news organization complained publicly about the removals.
The search engine has notified publishers of its decision to remove links to stories, a step it is not legally required to take. The move has prompted wider discussion of the cases. Some media observers suggested that Google had sought to publicize the forgotten articles in order to undermine the court ruling.
All these cases highlight the battles that have already broken out over Europe’s new “right to be forgotten” regime. Some want to be forgotten, others don’t. Making Google the judge in this case was an unintended consequence of the European court ruling.
Source: Financial Times
