As someone else mentioned on this thread, there's little distinction in search engine results between something that happened yesterday and something that happened 20 years ago. We now have the phenomenon of information no longer "aging". We've always had "news" to tell us what's, well, new. But over time that information would age. It would become harder to recall, and take more work to retrieve. A story on the evening news would later be in the paper, perhaps in a magazine a month later, then in a book a year after that. The book would move off the bestseller lists, the newspaper onto microfiche, and the magazine into the stacks of big libraries, or oblivion. The moving finger would write, and having written, move on.

But now it all lives forever, whether true or false, fresh and available and effortlessly findable by anybody, with no decay or attrition. It's a new and qualitatively different thing. The "right to be forgotten" feels like some attempt, probably quixotic, to align this new situation with the information decay expectations we've all had from the beginning of humanity right up until this very moment.