Progressive Madness

The "Right" To Be Forgotten

Here is an interesting example of how progressive ideology ends up showing its true colours--the long, black, sable  night of  Mordor.  The example comes once again from Europe, the European Court of "Justice" and ultimately from France.  

These folk want to rule the world--initially with soft power, then the iron fist in a velvet glove, then finally with just the iron fist.  They want to do all this to make their version of human rights sacrosanct, holy, and beyond question, impressed down upon every human being.  Their madness knows no limits.

Article 19 is a protest and information website, seeking to combat censorship and promoting freedom of expression wherever it is traduced.  It recently published the following:

Today, 23 November 2016 – ARTICLE 19, together with Human Rights Watch, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Open Net Korea, Derechos Digitales, Reporters sans Frontières, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and PEN International, intervened in a case at the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative court, concerning the worldwide application of a national concept of “the right to be forgotten”. We urged the Court to consider international standards on freedom of expression when reviewing the case.

The so-called “right to be forgotten” usually refers to the possibility of having certain results, produced from an online search of one’s name, delisted from search engine results pages. In its 2014 decision, the European Court of Justice stated this should be done when such search results are ‘inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant’. Subsequently, Google adopted a practice of removing the contentious results from the European versions of their search engine, when they accepted delisting requests from users based in the EU. More recently, after the French regulatory authority for data protection (the CNIL) approved complaints from web users that the delisting was not sufficiently effective, Google decided to make contentious search results inaccessible to all web users located in French territory.

In a decision of 16 March 2016, the CNIL found the geolocation-based solution to implementing accepted delisting requests to be insufficient, and imposed a €100,000 fine on Google for restricting the removal of contentious results to only those web users based in France. In the CNIL’s view, the effective application of the “right to be forgotten” would require that the contentious search results be rendered unavailable to all web users, regardless of their location. In essence, this position is tantamount to having the French data protection authority determine what can be found on search engines worldwide.

"Let's just reach into my hat", said the Mad Hatter to Alice.  "Hey presto.  Look what I have found.  I never knew it was there, hiding in my hat all along.  A right to be forgotten.  A human right to be forgotten."  We imagine that all the nefarious, first in France, then in Europe, danced a merry jig when this human right was discovered, err, fabricated.  Overnight they could remove any reference to themselves anywhere, at any time--at least any digital reference.  It would be the "sleeper agents" great boon.

Google was required to remove searches which folk did not like, first from searches originating in France.  Then it had to be extended to searches originating in Europe, since being a Frenchman (sorry, French person) was nothing.  Euroman was everything.  Then, since that was not enough, the French regulatory orcs are insisting that no-one anywhere in the world must be allowed to discover the not-to-be discovered, verboten stuff.  So the ban on what might be discovered via Google internet searches must be extended to the whole world.  Sorry, Trinidad and Tobago--you are disallowed, disenfranchised, and caged.  By order of Mordor.

All references to Sauron the Great must only and ever be a celebration of his majesty, his greatness, and his ineffable lightness of being.  No human being must ever see, hear, or read anything to the contrary.

As one local NZ blogger summed it up:

The French decision is the worst in a long line of decisions.  First the European Court of Justice invented this right to be forgotten, which means the right to hide material on the Internet.

At first it applied just to European versions of Google – such as google.fr.  Then they expanded it to all versions of Google, if someone is using a European IP address.  And finally the French authority declared that Google must remove mention of the material in every version of Google in every country.

If you took every employee and officer of the European Court of Justice and every French bureaucrat and official and laid them all in a long straight line, face down, head to toe--you would find it to be a very good thing.  Glorious, even.