A Spanish national objected that, when you Googled his name, the first thing you discovered was that 12 years earlier his property had been subject to proceedings involving debt recovery. He asked Google to remove the link, and argued that it was obliged to do so under an EU Directive on Data Protection. That directive applies to the UK, so this is a matter of importance to us all.

Crucially, in 1995, when the directive was adopted, the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Google was not even founded until 1998.