The reverberations from this week's landmark European Court of Justice
ruling on the right to be forgotten continue to be felt.
Legions of lawyers are still trying to work out what it will
mean for the search engines, and for millions of EU citizens who may
want to force them to remove links to their past online lives. And the
cultural divide between Europe and the US appears wider than ever, with
two very different views of how we should live our lives online.
On the one hand there is what you might call the web utopian
view, held by the US internet giants and some in Europe who look to
Silicon Valley for inspiration. This sees the ECJ ruling as unworkable,
illiberal and just out of touch.
The Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who divides his time
between London and the US, explains to me why something like it could
never happen across the Atlantic because of the constitutional guarantee
of free speech: "This is not a debate the United States is even capable
of entering into.
You'd have to repeal the First Amendment - and that's
like a religious artefact - so that's never going to happen."
So a battle between two views of freedom - the US belief that free
speech trumps everything, and the European view that individuals should
have some control over what the world knows about them. But there is
something else in play here, a growing unease about the power wielded by
what are nearly always US web giants over our lives.
Note EU-Digest:
US Corporations, including Facebook, Yahoo and Google are comparing
apples with Pears. The European Court of Justice decision is the right
one because there is a distinct difference between Personal Privacy Laws
and Freedom of Speech. Storing private information and selling that
information to third parties without pernission is in no way linked to
Freedom of Speech.
Congratulations to the European Court of Justice for a job well done.
Read more: BBC News - US v Europe - a cultural gap on the right to be forgotten
