I agree with your main point, btw.

However, both on paper and from real-world experience, I dare to say that the judicative is the least troubled arm.

In most of Europe, the legislative and executive are pretty much identical and that bothers me to no end. Parliament passes laws and parliament elects the executive, and all the executives (ministers, etc.) are also members of parliament. These two arms are not seperated at all. The USA has the better system there, even though it is still imperfect in that the same parties exist in both.

If I were to re-write the political rules, I'd seperate the arms completely and make a law that political parties can be active in either the executive or the legistlative election processes, but not in both and any attempt to do so leads to immediate dissolution of the party in question with all assets seized and distributed to the poor.

Let me repeat that: It is absolutely technically possible to filter based on source IP address country.

Yes, you can also do various trickery to cloak your real source behind another source. That doesn't invalidate the point.

Highly unlikely. Putin is beloved by the majority of russians, because under his government economy and internal security have improved dramatically. Most russians remember the 1990s when people were shot in the streets regularily, the way you only see in some old movies about when the Mafia ruled in some US cities. Compared to that time, they live in paradise now, and many attribute this change to Putin. Don't expect him to be out of power anytime soon. As for the russian elite, a lot of them own their fortune to this change. Never mistake criticism for opposition. Especially among politicians and the rich, it is fairly common to complain loudly about someone and still support them when it matters, because all the complaining and seeming hostility is simply an attempt to move them on certain topics.

You should update your propaganda-driven beliefs. I've got a russian girlfriend and I've been to Russia myself. At least for where I was (St. Petersburg), it looks much like any european city, except more beautiful (but that's a St. Petersburg special, they made very sure to keep all the old palaces and buildings in shape).

Crime was horrible in the 1990s, my girlfriend says, but here's why most russians actually love Putin: Since he became the top dog, things have been continuously improving. Crime is low, economy is good, of course nothing is perfect, but compared to previous times, they're pretty great.

From what I've seen in daily life, I don't see anything that would make them jealous of a random EU member country. Supermarkets are full of basically the same products I can buy here, everyone has a car, public transport is better than in some european cities, the streets are in good condition and clean, I felt safe both at day and at night.

Of course Putin doesn't want Ukraine to join the EU. But that they will all be able to suddenly buy bananas and thus run away from communism is 1990s stuff and long since outdated.

Yeah right, the infamous "mushroom cloud" comment was all about chemical weapons. Also I'm old enough to recall the attack on the Kurds, it happened in the 80's long before Clinton was elected. The Bush administration lied about nukes and lied about Saddam's connection to 911 because they wanted to "fix" the ME once and for all.

Sure most people wanted Saddam gone but most people could also see the end was not worth the means. The US should have backed down when it did not gain the support of the UN but they did the exact opposite. The US should have kept Iraq's public service intact but they disbanded them on the third day and the entire nation went on a looting rampage from which they still haven't recovered.

You mean like the typically politically motivated appointment of the judges of the supreme court? Oh wait, that's in the USA...

Legislative. Get your facts straight before you argue.

Let me guess, you're american and you didn't pay attention in school, so you think "Europe" is some small country somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, yes?

The EU is larger than the USA in people, economic power and basically every other metric except prison population. Blackhole the EU if you want. We may or may not come over to save the sorry remains of your economy in a couple years.

The trade volume between the USA and the EU is about 60 billion US$ monthly . However, the USA imports a lot more, while the import/export balance of the EU is almost balanced (http://ec.europa.eu/trade/policy/eu-position-in-world-trade/). Make a guess who would suffer more.

You've heard of this thing they call "Separation of Powers"? Maybe the news hasn't reached you yet, after all it's only been around for some 350 years.

Searching and speaking are really not the same thing. Once again, you can say they are related and one requires the other and so on, but all of that only means that yes, there really is no "right to search", you can only construct it from other rights.

Is a right in itself and maybe you can derive a "right to search" from it, but in doing so you would only prove my point that a "right to search" by itself is nowhere in the law books.

Nice hyperbole, but entirely beside the point. I already explained in my original posting what the legal situation actually is, I don't see why I should repeat it.

Of course, you can refute me easily. Find the correct EU law that contains the phrase "right to search" and post a link. I will apologize if you do.

You are jumping to conclusion there.

Europe would like its laws to be honoured by corporations doing business in the EU. If Google was ordered to remove X, but it is still present if I simply go to google.com instead of google.co.uk, then Google has not complied with the removal order.

It is absolutely technically possible to filter based on source IP address country. They can do it for advertisement, so there's absolutely no excuse for not doing it for legal compliance.

It is mostly not about stuff people put out there themselves. There are people out there who can't get a job because they were wrongfully accused of molesting a child 10 years ago, and the searches turn up the accusations, but not the acquittal (mostly because press rarely writes about it).

While you are right on this, I doubt it has much to do with this law. This law has been in the works since 1995 and was passed in 2012 if I recall correctly (many EU laws go into effect delayed, or require national laws to be passed to implement them). It was on the table long before anyone knew the name Snowden, and if at all then the NSA scandal only affected some final touches.

Legally speaking, they not only don't appear, they are not. The legal definition of censorship (at least here in Germany, YMMV) means pre-publication, government-agency control. Having a court (as opposed to a government agency) found something illegal and removing it has never been considered censorship in the legal sense.

Actually, the reason they don't is that if the source is outside the EU, it is a very lengthy and uncertain process. Now while you hail Internet anarchy, consider what options the lawmakers have:

1. They could sit on their thumbs doing nothing. While this option pleases the anarchist in us, you cannot expect a lawmaker to ignore lawbreakers - in fact, in most other instances of such an event, we would complain very loudly that they're lazy, corrupt bastards.
2. They can filter at the ISP level - welcome Internet censorship infrastructure. I'm pretty sure you don't want this alternative.
3. They understand that for 90% of the users, Google et al is The Internet, and if it can't be found in a search, it doesn't exist.

For all the whining here, the option they've taken is actually the least intrusive.

There is no such right, except in your imagination. There is a right (at least in my country, probably similar ones in the EU as a whole) to get information from publicly available sources. So the government cannot stop you from searching at all. But it can intervene in the information available if that information breaks laws. For example, copyrighted content, state secrets, but also information a court has found to be libel or slander.

And quite frankly speaking, for the cases this law is intended for (let's not focus only on the abuses, as most idiot journalists do because it makes for better headlines), the right of an individual to not have their life ruined by, say, completely made-up allegations of child abuse and rape quite clearly trumps your right of finding false and misleading information.