Congratulations to the EU courts. Through great skill and determination they have managed to construct the world's first self-Streisanding privacy law.
One in 70,000 is a rather low Streisand concentration...
You can focus media/public attention on at best a few individuals and have it be effective. Have tens of thousands, and the effect is too diluted to be meaningful.
After all, how dare people have privacy. In at least one case, the article being covered up was not due to a request by the subject of the article but from one of a few hundred commenters beneath the article. (Which could be an interesting attack vector, in the right circumstances.)
The thing is, Google removes results only on its European sites, like google.co.uk, people can still get results from google.com. Plus, news sites keep recording those removal requests (informed by Google), which could turn people to use those news sites as alternative search engines. I think these made the law pointless.
Edit: spellings.
But it's not self-streisanding, the Times actively wants to talk about that, they have an purpose, and it's not certainly not about a greater good, human rights and freedom, otherwise Guantanamo would be on the front page everyday. They are deliberately picking up on individuals.
Additionally; it seems EU courts are often making sensible and nuanced decisions which in many cases dramatically improve the quality of life of those unfairly affected.
It does comes at some expense to enormous and massively profitable companies, but that's typically the kind of tradeoff the EU is better at making (depending on your definition of better of course.)