Jimmy Wales Condemns “Wide-Sweeping Internet Censorship Ruling” From EU Over Google Search

Jimmy Wales has joined a number of detractors questioning an EU ruling which was made this week regarding Google search results, with the founder of Wikipedia calling the court's verdict "astonishing".

If you missed this one, it involves the EU's highest court making a decision on the "right to be forgotten" in the case of Mario Costeja González, a Spaniard who discovered that when he googled his own name, articles cropped up pertaining to the auctioning of his house to cover debts he owed back in the nineties.

González claimed that the availability of this information to the public at large constituted an infringement of his privacy rights – and requested that Google should remove the search results, as the matter had been resolved a long time ago and the results were now "irrelevant".

And the court agreed, with the EU Justice Commissioner, Viviane Reding, stating in a Facebook post that the ruling was "a clear victory for the protection of personal data of Europeans," and that data "belongs to the individual, not to the company. And unless there is a good reason to retain this data, an individual should be empowered – by law – to request erasure of this data."

However, Google called the verdict "disappointing" and said it would have to closely examine the implications. It has argued in the past that removal of data in such a way amounts to censorship of the Internet – a point freedom of speech activists have been quick to jump on, along with Jimmy Wales.

Talking to the BBC (Radio 5 live), Wales called the verdict "one of the most wide-sweeping Internet censorship rulings that I've ever seen".

"If you really dig into it, it doesn't make a lot of sense. They're asking Google... you can complain about something and just say it's irrelevant, and Google has to make some kind of a determination about that. That's a very hard and difficult thing for Google to do – particularly if it's at risk of being held legally liable if it gets it wrong in some way."

Wales concluded of the ruling: "I suspect this isn't going to stand for very long."