> I don’t think the view that this decision is correct is in any way consistent with any serious person’s understanding of freedom of expression.
> Wales: A part of the outcome should be the very strong implementation of a right to free speech in Europe — essentially the language of the First Amendment in the U.S.
As a european, a find this downright insulting and imperialist.
Suggesting Europe go literally copy the language of American documents was poor form, granted.
As to the broader issue, though, I worry there's less room for polite deference. The situation is basically equivalent to a European citizen calling me up and asking me a question, asking if I know something, and the European government insisting that I lie.
An offline analogue would be if I had a friend in Germany asking for dating advice. The friend might ask, "I can't get a sense of if this is a good idea or not. You know Jeffrey, has he ever, say, raped or murdered anyone?"
"Why, no, I have no information to suggest Mr. Dahmer is not a fine upstanding citizen," I'd be forced to reply of the infamous Milwaukee Cannibal.
I don't feel like a foreign government should be allowed to compel me to lie to its citizens, even by omission.
I've heard Stephen Fry rather charmingly suggest that Americans maintain an unhealthy obsession with free speech. Typically, that man can convince me any premise through simple assertion. But on this, I live up to my American stereotype, and stubbornly differ on the gravity of the issue.
Mostly, I find the ground sufficiently covered by Milton's "Areopagitica" and Mill's "nearly everything." Speaker's corner seems a fun European embrace of the concept. I'm not sure where in Europe you're from, but I'm sometimes surprised at concern from the UK. It reminds me of this cheesy anti-drug PSA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Elr5K2Vuo&t=17
Beyond Mill and Milton's plentiful arguments (mostly in the vein of there being little to fear from rebuttable conversation), I've yet to see anyone who is against freedom of speech lead by example. It all seems a bit hypocritical for someone to embrace restrictions on speech, with the tacit, "Except for on my points here, which are doubtless correct and vital to everyone's understanding of the issue."
You might cite the right to be forgotten as a case where we're really trying to protect the little guy, but would you fully embrace this principle and trust state power to determine who gets to be forgotten? How long until political scandals are all erased from Wikipedia by court order, while the identities and any embarrassing personal conduct of any peaceful dissenter is preserved for perpetuity under the guise of having relevance to a matter of public debate?
The issue of forcing the internet to forgive and forget is especially relevant in early June. Officials in Beijing have a similar rule forcing everyone to forget one of their youthful indiscretions from 25 years ago. Is that really a model policy?
How is it so many people feel we can't trust a state with a microphone, but we can trust it with muzzles?
EDIT: also, the state is not muzzling; the courts are. Even the UK has separation between the legislature and the courts.
Regardless of relevancy, I don't believe any government has the authority to oblige me, a foreigner, to lie to its citizens when they ask me a question. (Especially when its domestic businesses, like the Spanish newspaper, are fully entitled to continue printing the truth? Only foreigners have to play dumb? That inconsistency suggests it's all just protectionism dressed up as a rights issue they aren't really committed to.)
As to the "state" as an actor, I was just speaking in the broad governing sense of the word, as opposed to, say, financial power, or religious power. But the type of power isn't really relevant though, because muzzles aren't suddenly comfortable if applied by financiers or priests either.
Should court records about individuals and corporations be public information? What about government and police actions? Political contributions? Photographs of personal residences? Realtime lat and long of your smartphone?
But once we decide what can be public, it seems that only a luddite would try to control where that public information can appear. The very nature of truthful public information is that it is very difficult to control, direct or contain.
It requires authoritarian power and repression to manipulate public opinion by controlling public information. Is that really what we want in an open society?
You are worried comcast goes bankrupt?
These Europian law makers have this most ambitious idea for all personal information on the corporate websites to be editable by yours truly. Wikipedians go as far as to claim that one can not validate authorship over the Internet. If you cant offer the user the right to vanish it follows that you shouldn't be data mining the person let alone distribute it.
But you've done nothing to take down the source of the information so it's still in the public domain. Then you try to control who can make an index of information that is already freely available.
If your society decides the information should be non-public, then have the source take it down. But how can you leave it in the public domain and then try to control who is allowed to look at it?