News Journal: Beware the unintended consequences of stifling Google

A couple of months ago, the top court in the European Union ruled against Google in a case involving a Spanish citizen who claimed that a legal matter he had resolved years before should be deleted from a Google search of his name.
Google defended its policy of strictly adhering to the results produced by its impartial PageRank algorithm, which basically searches out Web pages that contain the keywords you type in, then assigns a rank to each page based on several factors, including how many times the keywords appear on the page and how many people have visited that page. Higher-ranked pages appear further up in the search results page. Google says that they make no judgments about the results.
The court ruled there is “a right to be forgotten,” and said Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it. The court pointed out that many innocent people have been harmed by information, often inaccurate and sometimes malicious, that appears when their names are the subjects of a Google search.
All the major groups that stick up for privacy welcomed the decision and my first reaction was that it was probably reasonable. In fact, I thought about what had famously happened to Rick Santorum, hardly my favorite politician, when he ran for president. He was the victim of a website that came up with an obscene definition of his name. Because of the number of people who visited that site, it became the first page that came up when you did a Google search of Santorum. Funny to some, but still, I thought, not fair.
Not fair. There is no question that Google searches have hurt many people, some completely innocent, some not. But the EU court’s remedy, it seems to me on further reflection, might turn out to be a classic case of unintended consequences. I saw that often enough in the many years I spent working on legislation in the United States Senate. You try to solve a problem with a new law. But the new law sometimes creates new problems that you never anticipated. I don’t believe there has ever been a major comprehensive bill in our history that has not created some unintended new problems that had to be fixed after the bill became law.
We are seeing more and more of this as the problems we try to solve become more complex. We also are made more aware of unintended legislative consequences now that we have 24/7 cable news stations and Internet blogs that live off the Monday morning quarterbacking of just about everything.
I think all of us have experienced unintended consequences in our own lives. We make carefully reasoned decisions to solve a problem and discover later on that those decisions have created unanticipated, sometimes negative, consequences.
What did the European Union court’s decision unleash? The right-to-privacy groups are now demanding that Google extend the “right to be forgotten” rule throughout the world. I can’t think of anything involving the dissemination of information that would be more welcomed by totalitarian governments and dictators.
I spent 13 years on the Broadcasting Board of Governors, overseeing U.S. international broadcasting, including Voice of America. I saw over and over again how dictators tried to control and shape the flow of information. Often, they were not only concerned with what was being broadcast in their own countries, but also with what was broadcast around the world.
Americans take a free press and an uncensored Internet for granted. But Freedom House estimates only 1 in 7 people around the world live in a country with what it defines as a free press. What will happen if “the right to be forgotten” becomes the law in those countries?
Do we really want Google to have to delete negative information about someone who was involved in some fraudulent activity simply because it happened 10 years ago?
And what kind of pressure would there be on Google to delete information about criminal Russian oligarchs or corrupt Chinese government officials?
We all have an interest in protecting privacy rights. But we also need to make sure that the EU court’s decision does not create the unintended consequence of stifling freedom of information and protecting those who deserve no protection.
Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.