Wikipedia founder speaks out against French demand worldwide ‘right to forget’

Wikipedia co-founder Jim Wales warns of the ramifications if France has its way of enforcing a global right to be forgotten with Google. According to him, this leads to large-scale internet censorship by regimes.

Wales calls France’s demands for Google to hide results worldwide ‘disturbing’ to Reuters. The consequences could be disastrous, he said. “You open a barrel full of problems. It becomes a ridiculous race to the bottom, with the internet censored by the most restrictive jurisdictions.”

He points out the danger that, for example, the Chinese government can enforce worldwide censorship if the line that the French have taken is followed. According to Wales, Wikipedia is increasingly faced with national laws that it must comply with.

The French privacy watchdog CNIL has been trying to enforce a right to be forgotten with Google for some time. The company suggested geofiltering the search engine, whereby Google uses the IP address of someone searching Google.com to not show objected results. The CNIL found this insufficient and imposed a fine. The watchdog believes that legitimate requests for forgetting should be granted with all extensions of the search engine.