Free speech American Style is American, the EU is different, whether better or worse is not for me to decide but it is the law of the land and as such it should be respected by corporations operating there.
The EU is concerned with privacy here, you are concerned with censorship, those are not the same concepts and they are not addressed by the same mechanisms.
The fact that in some EU countries (ex) politicians hold large stakes in media conglomerates and can manipulate public opinion is a much bigger source for worry than that some politician embroiled in a juicy scandal would be able to wipe his trail completely. Especially newspapers will take a serious stance against that and it will simply not work.
Or they won't, as you noticed they are owned by ex-politicians. Or they would, but the law gets passed anyway and what they do? They don't have 1st amendment to appeal to, so they get nothing.
>>> Free speech American Style is American, the EU is different, whether better or worse is not for me to decide
Why not for you? Nobody can prohibit you to think for yourself and decide if having freedom of speech is better or worse than not having it. Not even EU can, at least for now until they didn't invent "right not to be thought of".
So how can such a double standard possibly be justified? How can google be forced to delete things from the servers, but newspaper archives can't be forced to burn their material?
What I find interesting is how everybody is focusing on Google here, when the real focus should be not on how this system could be abused but why it exists and who it could benefit. And that gives a completely different picture. But it's late here (3 am) and I'm off to bed.
They're not taking down "automated collections of data", they are taking down links to newspaper articles. The exact same articles that are in the archives.
The focus SHOULD be on how the system IS abused because the costs of the abuse vastly outsize any potential benefits.
Funny thing is that the case that brought this ruling is about forcing Google to delete any mention to a newspaper article and nothing about the article in itself