The E.U.'s 'right to be forgotten' law hits Wikipedia. The BBC reports a Wikipedia entry has now been removed from Google search results. People have had varying responses to this law. Are link removals reasonable, or do they amount to censorship? It is admittedly a difficult issue. As an update, Google so far has received 90,000 requests for links to be removed, connecting more than 300,000 pages. More than half of these requests have been approved, Google told its European data watchdogs.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has long expressed his concerns about the "right to be forgotten". Speaking on BBC Radio, Mr. Wales said: "The law as it stands right now is quite confusing."

"We have this one ruling of the ECJ which is very open-ended and very hard to interpret. I would say the biggest problem we have is that the law seems to indicate Google needs to censor links to information that is clearly public - links to articles in legally published, truthful news stories.

That is a very dangerous path to go down, and certainly if we want to go down a path where we are going to be censoring history, there is no way we should leave a private company like Google in charge of making those decisions."

-Jimmy Wales

Recently, the European Union passed controversial legislation that grants people the "right to be forgotten," which forces Google to remove links if requested. While good intentions may have gone into the arguments for this new law, it appears there can be serious unintended consequences as some critics have vocally predicted. Legitimate, honest journalism can be removed from Google's search results and practically struck from the public record. This history-erasing link removal amounts to internet censorship. Many people are finding this disturbing. There's already an example of potential abuse; Google had to stop displaying links in Europe to this BBC article about former Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal. The article is a factual piece of journalism from a respected organization, not unfounded libel. Business Insider notes, "O'Neal led the bank in the mid-2000s, a period when it became dangerously over-exposed to the looming mortgage crisis. When the crisis hit, Merrill's losses were so great the bank had to be sold to Bank of America. O'Neal lost his job, but he exited with a $161.5 million golden parachute."

Robert Peston, the BBC Economics Editor, says, "There is an argument that in removing the blog, Google is confirming the fears of many in the industry that the 'right to be forgotten' will be abused to curb freedom of expression and to suppress legitimate journalism that is in the public interest."

It appears O'Neal himself did not request the link to be removed, but rather someone who had simply commented on the post. Business Insider concludes their piece on the story with, "Right now, thousands of people probably think that Stan O'Neal is on some quixotic quest to make people forget that he was at the wheel when Merrill drove off a cliff. And there is no evidence that that's the case. But because the law exists, we have no idea what the truth is. That ought to worry everyone."

To be fair, while the Google is complying with the law, it had fought against its passage. First it happened in China, and now Europe is censoring Google. God Bless the USA, home of the free! Right? RIGHT??