is literacy a natural state? If you consider the history of the us, probably just barely.
on to your argument, such as it is: pretending that our two choices are we can have easy access to information or not is, well, dumb: we can certainly allow individuals (as europe has demonstrated) to remove things from google while retaining access to, oh, 99.9998% (first estimate of google's index that popped up on google: 30B pages. removal requests: 70k in 2 months. 1 - 7e4/30e9) of information in the world. And that is a severe underestimate: information can still be returned, just not for particular searches as far as I understand. So starting with humane things like removing revenge porn, whether the host is or is not within us copyright jurisdiction, ad probably moving on to relatively private facts about peoples' lives is a great place to start. I'm not sure where we'll end, but I'm far more comfortable with governments -- who, after all, nominally represent the governed -- deciding than with google.
edit: for another example: particularly the HN audience which runs young, white or asian, male, glibertarian, and tech employee has little to fear from personal info leaking online: sf doesn't care about most things, ranging from lgbtq to bdsm to swinging to whatever. But there's a lot of places that do. You don't have to look far to see what would happen in, say, utah to a high school-aged transgender kid. Restricting that information online is completely reasonable.
on to your argument, such as it is: pretending that our two choices are we can have easy access to information or not is, well, dumb: we can certainly allow individuals (as europe has demonstrated) to remove things from google while retaining access to, oh, 99.9998% (first estimate of google's index that popped up on google: 30B pages. removal requests: 70k in 2 months. 1 - 7e4/30e9) of information in the world. And that is a severe underestimate: information can still be returned, just not for particular searches as far as I understand. So starting with humane things like removing revenge porn, whether the host is or is not within us copyright jurisdiction, ad probably moving on to relatively private facts about peoples' lives is a great place to start. I'm not sure where we'll end, but I'm far more comfortable with governments -- who, after all, nominally represent the governed -- deciding than with google.
edit: for another example: particularly the HN audience which runs young, white or asian, male, glibertarian, and tech employee has little to fear from personal info leaking online: sf doesn't care about most things, ranging from lgbtq to bdsm to swinging to whatever. But there's a lot of places that do. You don't have to look far to see what would happen in, say, utah to a high school-aged transgender kid. Restricting that information online is completely reasonable.