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Comment by qudat | Hacker News Reader

The idea sounds nice but politicians controlling an index would be an abject disaster.

Competitive markets > Governments > monopolies

Government is the ultimate coercive monopoly; all coercive monopolies derive their power from the arbiters of force — the government.

Governments are at least supposed to be accountable to their constituencies, monopolies are only accountable to their shareholders.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

Busting a monopoly is not an exercise in tyranny. Do you weep for Standard Oil or Bell? If anything, the US government is lenient towards monopolies. None of the 21st century behemoths have been busted.

^^ C.S. Lewis, for anyone wondering.

With all due respect to Mr. Lewis, this quote is crap. I have no reason to believe that the robber baron's cruelty may sleep, nor that his cupidity might be satiated, nor that conscience enters into it for that robber baron.

A private monopoly is accountable to only the owner. May as well be feudalism. In a liberal democracy, government monopolies have accountability to the people. When that is subverted or corrupted, it sucks, but at least there's a mechanism.

There's no such mechanism with a private monopoly.

I thought C.S. Lewis was an ardent apologist for a particular omnipotent moral busybody?

I like this! But I do think many markets make sense to be heavily regulated, beyond just anti-trust. (For instance, my work involves wholesale power markets, which are heavily regulated by necessity, but in my view remain better than vertically integrated monopoly power providers.)

What about efforts by say, the Internet Archive, and maybe more specialized indexes maintained by communities?

Already has been - what fraction of 'right to be forgotten' requests are actually in the social good, as opposed to just criminals of various levels covering up their crimes?

Of course, "criminals of various levels" "covering up" their, say, stupid 19-year-old mistake drug conviction is exactly why many people favor right to be forgotten things. The idea that it would be in the social good to have easy access to everything someone did or posted for decades seems ludicrous. Privatized ubiquitous surveillance and record-keeping is not a good thing.

Civil society was founded on, and still depends on, public trials and public laws. Since Hammurabi. That has nothing to do with "ubiquitous surveillance", it is the most important and basic record keeping.

It is up then to each person reading the records to decide if a crime is old enough or unimportant enough to not matter. That should not be the decision of internet censors or courts who want to sweep their traces under the rug. Or criminals wanting to do that.

If most people think that drug use is not something a person should be trialed for, then the laws need to be changed. Censoring doesn't remove the fact. It just removes discourse to the realm of gossip.

I think of it more as a "right to rewrite history".

"He who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the future."

Are there any request that are actually just criminals of various levels covering up their crimes? Since the right to be forgotten exists I've been hearing about this misuse of this right but never have I seen one case been presented to show how it is being misused. If you don't know of such a case on what is your opinion of this right based then?

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