I'm ambivalent about RTBF when it's confined to a particular country - I can see arguments in favor and against. But I think having one country's laws on free speech extend out of that country is a massive bridge too far. Anybody advocating for this needs to consider reciprocity - will they accept other countries laws regulating what they can see, publish, read and hear?
But even with that aside, I don't think having the laws spread out of an individual country reflects the spirit and intent of RTBF laws. The essential problem is that people's privacy is violated because it suddenly becomes trivial to find out negative, inaccurate and out of context information incidentally. That is, you find out by accident, through casual browsing and not because you specifically desired to research negative information about that person. It has always been possible to find out about people's past if you put in specific effort. Doing that is an essential activity for all kinds of reasons. Going out of your way to use a VPN or a dedicated other-country search site demonstrates an explicit attempt to research a person beyond mere casual informational purposes.
So I think extending these laws out of their country of origin not only is a terrible idea for free speech, but it doesn't even reflect the spirit of the laws themselves.
I agree with your opinion that it's ludicrous to extend RTBF beyond a country's borders but I feel that even RTBF within a country or collection of countries could be detrimental. If you do something newsworthy enough to make it into a newspaper, I can go find out what you did (unless RTBF also requires printed papers to go redact your information from each copy). Isn't this collective knowledge part of what keeps society running? And doesn't this provide incentives to behave (to those who are thinking about misbehaving)?
If you're thinking along those lines, you might consider that reputable newspapers (and TV news shows) do issue retractions when earlier reports have been incorrect or misleading. There is also some debate about how certain -- perhaps less reputable -- newspapers will print a big front page article that is wrong, and then issue a tiny retraction on page 17 a few weeks later. The concern is very similar to the arguments for RTBF online: disproportionate coverage can leave the wrong impression with readers. Also similar to RTBF, there is talk of stronger regulation, such as requiring retractions to be printed or announced as prominently as the original story.
I don't disagree with you ... if someone publishes incorrect information they should own up to it and issue a retraction. And it makes complete sense to make sure the original incorrect information is at least deprioritized.
> If you do something newsworthy enough to make it into a newspaper, I can go find out what you did
The goal of the law is to be able to remove your drunk picture from 5 years ago from the engine results so a prospective employer will not discard you for it. Cyber-bulling is another scenario where maybe you want to protect the victim and remove attackers posts/tweets/... from the search engine. Or maybe I just said 10 years ago that I hate Java and have repented since then and I just want it to be forgotten so my right to privacy is respected. You have right to choose what you share on-line, but once it is in the wild one of the most powerful companies in the world - trying to do a good service - is going to keep it for ever. This is something new in a society that - not so long ago - allowed people to move city and start their lives from scratch.
For what I understand removing your search results for a newspaper is an abuse of the law, even that it is going to happen as I guess that this case is not protected enough by RTBF. And for me that's the most important part. This new law should assure that newsworthy events are not forgotten. It should protect news, while also protects privacy of things that you - or others in your behalf - have shared in the past.
It is tricky, but I believe in a complex world of grays and not just black and white situations.
Collective knowledge of important, relevant things. But that is a small, constantly changing set of theories and knowledge.
Inability to stop focusing on irrelevant details (ie, too much information intake) or inability to move on from no-longer-accurate information (ie, too good a memory) are both heavily involved with mental illness and psychiatric disorders -- and I think are causing society level mental illness, now.
But even with that aside, I don't think having the laws spread out of an individual country reflects the spirit and intent of RTBF laws. The essential problem is that people's privacy is violated because it suddenly becomes trivial to find out negative, inaccurate and out of context information incidentally. That is, you find out by accident, through casual browsing and not because you specifically desired to research negative information about that person. It has always been possible to find out about people's past if you put in specific effort. Doing that is an essential activity for all kinds of reasons. Going out of your way to use a VPN or a dedicated other-country search site demonstrates an explicit attempt to research a person beyond mere casual informational purposes.
So I think extending these laws out of their country of origin not only is a terrible idea for free speech, but it doesn't even reflect the spirit of the laws themselves.