I feel it is basically a cultural issue. Many Europeans (including me) believe that the "right to be forgotten" is real, i.e. we want that right. Company with american cultural roots feels differently, so there's a clash. The main problem is that Google doesn't want to submit to our European culture; which is fine, they can fight in court.
We had that in Russia since 2016, and your guess how it works is exactly correct (e.g. see Skrynnik vs Yandex case).
What I don't understand though, is how this is supposed to help. If you want a fact to disappear, shouldn't you work that out with the publisher? Until you do that, it isn't really forgotten... just kind of badly remembered. I mean, people can still access that story as long as it's on the internet.
- the fact you were member of X and you done some comments gets a good Page Rank
- X becomes very unpopular, people that believed in X ideology are seen as idiots,racists,violent
- you got older and smarter and you realized your mistake
- you made some other good things during your life, like maybe won chess tournaments, volunteered,donated to charities,raise children
And the problem will be that your mistake will be on the top results on web search wile your good stuff will probably not be online or if it is will be on 3rd or 4rd web search page(the even where you won the chess competition has a bad page rank)
Many issues you can say are a society problem, like a murder, you can argue that the society is at fault for creating them, allowing guns, drogs, bad education.
So for this problem I think there should be some technical solution for affecting the page rank of some pages on Google or other searches in some conditions, and now we need to find some fair conditions when this should happen, maybe google could fix the algorithm to not give such a big page rank to this kind of stories in general.
> solved more elegantly by creating anti-discrimination laws around criminal records
Such laws have a terrible record. What happens in reality is not that company says "screw it, we'll take a risk of hiring a criminal since we can't run a background check" but "we'll use next available statistical heuristic for being a criminal and if you have it we won't let you nowhere around 90% - we'd fail you much earlier and we'd build the process in a way that you can prove nothing". And if you're familiar with statistical heuristics they'd use - and note they're not trained statistician so they wouldn't go into such details as "bad sign for the whole population but good sign for this particular tiny subgroup", especially if they hire for a position where they have a large pool of candidates - you can imagine how discriminatory it would be in practice.