I am opposed to the idea that because something is a machine process, the people who operate that machine should not be held responsible for any harm it does.
Do you think Google holds a larger, equal, or smaller responsibility than the content provider who is actually hosting this "harmful" information?
In this case, I don't see anyone at fault and don't think a crime has been committed. The data presented was true and of public record.
I would see a case if Google was somehow treating this man as a special case and only indexing negative things about him, or if google treated his publicly available data differently than any other person's
Who gets to decide what is harmful is indeed generally decided by courts.
I agree that it shouldn't be a special case. Google does discriminate based on how much other information about a person is posted online - someone with a lot of professional info online will look better than someone who doesn't used the internet much and so only these public records appear against their name in search. That is a dangerous form of discrimination.