At first glance, the recent decision by Europe’s top court to enforce the “right to forget” for personal information seems unconnected to economic growth. After all, if a young adult asks a search engine to delete links to indiscreet teenage pictures, what harm could that do to GDP or living standards?
But here’s the problem: Once search engines such as Google are require to set up a large-scale mechanism by which links to personal information can be deleted, history suggests that it will be all too easy to use the same mechanism for deleting links to other information as well. Unpleasant historical information—gone. Information that offends some powerful politician—gone. Technical knowledge that challenges a powerful incumbent company—gone.
And with no links, it’s as if the information isn’t there.
The Internet is the greatest engine for the replication and spreading of knowledge that the world has ever seen. As such, it is also the greatest engine for global growth. An technological or institutional advance made in one country can spread nearly instantaneously around the world.
Forcing search engines to delete links wholesale is like lobotomizing the Internet. Go far enough down that path, and the spread of knowledge will stutter and global growth will slow. Is the gains from “right to forget” worth the pain?
