(6. August) A recent European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision is undermining the world’s ability to freely access accurate and verifiable records about individuals and events. The impact on Wikipedia is direct and critical.

In Google Spain v. AEPD and Mario Costeja González, the ECJ ordered Google to remove links to a 1998 newspaper announcement of a real estate auction connected to a Spanish citizen’s debt.[1] That decision represents a crude implementation of the “right to be forgotten”—the idea that people may demand to have truthful information about themselves selectively removed from the published public record, or at least made more difficult to find.

In doing so, the European court abandoned its responsibility to protect one of the most important and universal rights: the right to seek, receive, and impart information.