Chances are Joe Schmoe did post something like "Death to capitalist pigs and the corporate management culture" in the comment section, using his real name and not a nick. Joe Schmoe is actually looking for a job and whenever his possible future employer googles him, he finds out that Joe Schmoe might not be a good match after all. Joe Schmoe, once a campus arnachist, now has a mortgage and a 2 yo to care about, works in the banking industry to make a living, and may very well have switched views in the last 7 years.

I guess I can understand why one wants to remove such information from google searches about himself. The EU Court of Justice has said such request should be refused if public interest weights in. It may not be in the public interest to photoshop searches about Merill Lynch former CEO Stan O'Neal, but I guess the same public interest remains relatively unscathed when photoshopping Joe Schmoe search results.

An interesting development yesterday in TFA : the request wasn't made in the name of the former CEO but by a person who left a comment on the original 2007 article. In other words, the article won't show up when looking up the name of the person who made the comment, but it will still show up when googling for Stan O'Neal.

Maybe Stan O'Neal knew too well he wasn't going to be forgotten. If he didn't, what a powerful reminder !

Nevertheless, here is the catch :

• - if you want google to stop indexing things you published by yourself, you submit a request and Google will notify you. End of story, as you are both the submitter of the request and the publisher of the original content.
• - if you want google to stop indexing things about you published by others, you submit a request and Google will notify you and the publisher. The publisher is perfectly within his right to challenge Google decision and/or the original request in court.I doubt a high-profile public person will win such a case against the press. Lawsuit or not, I bet there will be a huge Streisand effect if such a person even tries to use that kind of regulation to hide a such newspiece about him. This would be a blatant distortion of the intent of the law.