It seems this directive is aimed at protecting individuals, not so much companies. Big companies can afford SEO experts to bury bad information in any case, and this is seen in action with many rogue casinos. There is also a public interest issue, so the public interest of being able to research the past history of a company before parting with money would probably outweigh the commercial interests of the company of burying it's past.
Google tried to pull the "but our servers are in the US so we don't have to obey" argument, but it was slapped down by the EU court. Funny how EU customers are bound by US laws when it suits Google, Microsoft, and others, yet when things are the other way around, they pull the jurisdiction argument.
Well, online casino servers are based in Malta, and under Maltese law, can offer gambling offshore, the "Google argument" would, if successful, mean that the US would have no jurisdiction in terms of prohibiting casinos based there from accepting US customers, yet the US feels they DO have this right to force offshore casinos to enforce US laws, and any company executive who refuses can (and has been) opportunistically arrested should they stray onto US soil.
The US should be thankful that Google lost, as they can use the same "...but provides service to.." argument to assert that offshore casinos must adhere to US laws if providing their services to US customers.
Of course, Google isn't the only search engine, so once it becomes known that Google are sanitising searches on request, people who want to see ALL the information on someone, not a censored sample, will turn to other means.
If someone wrote a search application that performed all searches from scratch, and was sold "as is" to subscribers, it would come with no mechanism for censoring results, manipulating rankings, etc. It would crawl the web afresh each time, and gather EVERYTHING that was present. The downside is that it would take a long time through having no indexing, but those using it would know that nothing would be deliberately hidden from it.
I wonder if this is a prospect that worries Google, because it would be legally unable to compete with such a service because of it's size, availability to justice, and this court ruling.
They are exaggerating somewhat, because they already have a system in place for censoring links upon request from the major US media conglomerates, and this involves many thousands of links which change on a daily basis. It appears that what they don't like is being answerable to the everyday individual in this regard, because they would have to introduce a similar "shoot first, and wait for the complaints" system as they use for taking down anything that might conceivably infringe copyright, even if it doesn't. Many have had non-infringing content removed by mistake, and have found it next to impossible to appeal the decision. It seems likely that if implemented, individuals could have a "shoot first" system that would take down the link, and then might put it back up if someone argues that there is a public interest case. In effect, this would not happen very often, so individuals would end up with the same power as the big media conglomerates. Hurt the most would be those companies that make a living from gathering up our personal data from a variety of sources, packaging it up, and then selling it on in various forms. That's another business arm of Google is it not
