I'm ignorant of the actual law, so this is just a guess. Targeting the companies indexing the information is probably a more tractable problem then tracking down and eliminating all the sources. There's only a handful of really influential companies indexing this data compared to the numbers that produce and distribute it. If you remove the indexes and render the information difficult to find, its not that much different from removing the information altogether.

And my guess is: the local newspapers are a worse political target than evil large western company they can blame all their ills on :)

"Targeting the companies indexing the information is probably a more tractable problem then tracking down and eliminating all the sources."

I don't buy this. All of these sources need a way to print retractions/etc in these countries due to the way libel/etc laws work. So they already must have mechanisms to achieve this.

This is like targeting library card catalogs for indexing microfiche.

> And my guess is: the local newspapers are a worse political target than evil large western company they can blame all their ills on :)

I don't think that's the reason:

> In 1995 the European Union adopted the European Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46EC) to regulate the processing of personal data.[9] This is now considered a component of human rights law.[10] The new European Proposal for General Data Protection Regulation provides protection and exemption for companies listed as “media” companies, like newspapers and other journalistic work. However, Google purposely opted out of being classified as a “media” company and so is not protected. Judges in the European Union ruled that because the international corporation, Google, is a collector and processor of data it should be classified as a “data controller” under the meaning of the EU data protection directive. These “data controllers” are required under EU law to remove data that is “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant, ” - making this directive of global importance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

That's how the law is written. A newspaper can publish archives, but not do anything it likes with the influence of the front page.