> You just won't be able to rely on a search engine to gather all that information for you

Sure you will, as long as you don't use Europe's neutered version of reality.

An iteration on the European court's decision might require operators to amend their robots.txt files. It's not hard to conceive of multiple approaches to the same end. In any case, your objection is not responsive to my point that free speech remains uninfringed.

Free speech remains uninfringed as long as Europeans can still reach US search results.

Free speech remains uninfringed even if all search results are the same.

So it is still free speech even if no one is allowed to hear it?

As I said earlier, I'm not sure algorithmically generated search results rise to the level of political speech as they're not expressive of an opinion.

You are still allowed to find and read the original article under this EU law. You are just not entitled to have it pre-emptively collected and indexed for you if the subject of the article has a colorable wish to preserve their privacy.

Sounds like a good use of EU resources.

> No it isn't. You can still do research and publish stories like 'John Doe, running for office, was convicted of littering 20 years ago...' You just won't be able to rely on a search engine to gather all that information for you; you'll have to research your subject a more old-fashioned way, looking through all the stories from the period.

I don't see that that's morally different from e.g. "you have to pay a $20 fine if you do this."

What if I have a hand-crafted artisanal search engine, like Yahoo Directory. Are those exempt from this law?

What you are suggesting would further entrench and enrich the Fourth Estate.

Is that your intent?

It's not my intent, and I find your premise questionable. Are you suggesting that newspapers and similar organs would try to make money out of people who wanted to search their archives? If so then yes, they probably would, but so what?

No, I am suggesting that people who are not payed to search through archives will frequently lack the time to search through archives. Digging through newspaper articles at your local library to find information on the dozen politicians on the ballet is something that most people do not have the time/resources to do. For the most part, these people will have to rely on the media to do that for them.

Search engines are an equalizer, they allow people to search through massive amounts of data blazingly fast. This closes the gap between the research a professional reporter is capable of, and the research that the general public is capable of.

Again, so what? In the case of a politician running for office, the media is likely to do that research anyway; take a look at Oregon, where the governor's fiancee is mired in scandal over long-past personal relationship, which is being pushed with a barely-implicit guilt-by-association angle for the Governor's implied failure to perform due diligence on his intended wife. You're also overlooking the 'public interest' exemption to redaction of search results which has been extensively documented and would certainly apply to the case of a candidate seeking office.

Meanwhile, you're completely ignoring the actual problem, which is that now anyone can do a bang-up research job on private rather than public individuals, without being held to any ethical standards for journalistic accreditation or publication. Somewhere upthread I pointed out the example of mugshot aggregation sites, which operate a thinly-veiled extortion racket under the rubric of 'free speech'.