If google wants to ignore an erasure request for journalistic and public good/interest reasons, yes.

Responsible Journalism can’t ignore stuff like this, so I’m not surprised that the Judge would expect google, after making the journalism case, to demonstrate some of that attention to detail.

No, Google has the right to fight each such request in court.

This is basically an impossible burden to bear. If everyone who had anything whatsoever bad about them on the internet decided that the tiny burden of sending a letter was a worthy use of time then fighting the 1/10 which were the most dubious would ruin google financially.

This is like a network where you can cause a network to waste a GB of data by sending a KB of data.

The only reasonable response in that situation would be to invest only the money available to fight the worst of the worst requests and blanket accept almost everyone's request to silence anyone else.

If you turn it around and make a single request take a few thousand dollars worth of legal fees and many hours of work then worthless requests which are likely to be denied wont be bothered with but the most worthy may still be seen to.

Excellent, the law works as intended.

You want anyone to be able to silence anyone via a letter?