Comment Google’s latest celebrity recruit, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, recently gave an extraordinary performance on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. We want to share with you what he said – verbatim – with expert commentary.

It’s about the decision of a top European court that Google cannot be exempt from the Continent's privacy and data protection laws.

The decision balances two "fundamental rights” – privacy and freedom of expression – and gives an individual power to request that Google removes a search result link if the information is old and irrelevant, and if it is not in the public interest.

Google can refuse, forcing the complainant to appeal to the relevant regional privacy watchdog or take the matter to court to get a decision.

Bearing all this in mind, let’s see how the American guest got on.

Marr: Should we have the right to erase data we don't like about ourselves from the internet? Should we know how far surveillance goes in our super hi tech world? Should companies like Google be compelled to censor data? All these questions are now hot topics at the moment and are in the mind of one of the internet's undisputed legends, Jimmy Wales. The American-born entrepreneur is best known as the founder of the era-defining online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia.

That's an effusive welcome to the Man From The Internet. Imagine one of Marr’s usual guests - George Osborne or Ed Balls - being introduced as “an undisputed legend”. In fact Wales is more accurately described as the "cofounder" of Wikipedia. It was Larry Sanger, appointed by Wales, who chose the Wiki software, gave Wikipedia its name, and devised many of the rules still in use today. From 2004, Wales made many attempts to “censor" Sanger out of the history of Wikipedia - removing references to him as “cofounder”, before being told to stop by the site’s community.

But on with the show.

Marr: Welcome to you, thanks for coming in. Can I talk first about this new Europe ruling which seems a very big one? It seems that anyone has the right to apply to have data about themselves struck out of Google's engines, Google's search engines?

Wales: It's quite broad in ways that many people found very surprising. The case in particular that the Court decided was a case about a link from Google to a newspaper story - legally published, still available online. Um. So It's not just about stolen data, it's not about libel, it's about true facts published in newspapers that can no longer be linked to by Google. It's a fairly astonishing thing to think about.

The ECJ’s ruling merely ruled that Google was not exempt from Data Protection laws. The ruling, which had to balance two European “fundamental rights” - freedom of expression and the right to privacy - was warmly welcomed by many groups including the UK Information Commissioner, and much of the European press.

Marr: So in theory, if I am a corrupt business person and I have had a series of convictions and so forth in the past, I can apply to Google saying I don't want people to know about this any more.

Indeed you can, but you’re wasting your time. The ECJ said the ruling only related to out of date and irrelevant information. A search engine can refuse the request and bounce it along to the national data protection office. And it can appeal any judicial ruling.

Wales: it's worse than China

Marr: … And a committee on which you sit will have to decide the rules by which I'm [as a corrupt biz bod] successful or fail.

Marr was completely bamboozled by his researchers on two counts. One is the structure of the legal process - in which a judge ultimately decides. And the nature of the Google "advisory" committee, on which Wales sits.

Wales is given an opportunity to correct Marr. How does he handle it?

Wales: Well er, I'm advising er, Google, and basically I have joined this panel with Google. But it's not just about advising Google what to do. I think I view us having a broader remit, asking: "how should we change the law so we can better strike a better balance between privacy and free speech?"

So Wales reveals for the first time that the Advisory Committee performs an additional lobbying role aimed at governments on Google's behalf. It wants to “change the law”.

The law, Article 8, is based on the European Convention on Human Rights’ own Article 8, which states:

"Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence”.

So it’s your human right to privacy Wales wants to undermine.

'Leave it to the Courts' pleads Jimbo - Translation: 'Let publishers, not Google, foot the legal bills'

Why?

Wales: … So we don't end up with these very clumsy cases where Google has to determine whether a news story is something they're legally allowed to link to or not. That's a very hard position … that's a kind of decision that should be left um, to courts, um, at best.

Indeed, that’s just what will happen. The difference is that now the legal burden that comes with publishing information about people can fall on Google with its billions of dollars of revenue, rather than on the newspaper, website etc it is linking to - as has commonly been the case until now.

Google won't ultimately decide what it should link to - regulators or courts will. So two minutes into the exchange, we’ve already established that Wales is lobbying for a change in European privacy law, and doing so based on a false premise. You don’t need a polygraph to detect a little discomfort from Wales with the increased frequency of his ums and ahs.

Marr: I was wondering about Wikipedia itself. Because a lot of people don't like their Wikipedia site - 'Andrew Marr is a well known trick cyclist' - and I'm not, and I'm not happy with it, and I want that to be struck out. Can I now apply to Wikipedia to have that infamy removed?

Wales: First, we've always been open to those suggestions from people have a concern about their entry. I have just got a fantastically long email from someone who has been complaining about their Wikipedia entry for many years. A convicted fraudster who has had a Wikipedia entry from before her most recent conviction for fraud. And y'know … So for us we would not take something like that down. But y'know what's interesting for us is that maybe Google would not be able to link to it. And I think that's a real problem for the public internet.

The dilemma may be a problem for Google - but only if it wants to make it to into a problem. Wikipedia merely needs a citation not an online citation. The information contained in the newspaper article is widely available through the newspapers and Lexis-Nexis.

Marr: Do you think this is a moment for the internet age that's a serious one - in other words, we're moving to a stage where Governments are trying to grab power? Um, and that, that …

This is an extraordinary statement by Marr, who seems to be unable to distinguish between the executive branch and the judicial branch. The right to a private life was established in UK law when it adopted the European Convention on Human Rights. The law itself has kicked around since 1995.

Not surprisingly, Wales can’t quite believe the gift he’s been handed.

What's the equivalent of Godwin's Law, but for China not Nazi Germany?

Wales: Without question. Without question.

Y'know I've never seen something like this from um, Western democracies. From democracies, generally. We have the same kind of rules that apply in er, er China. Google is not allowed to link to certain things in China.

Here Wales compares Europe’s balanced ruling - which must include freedom of expression - to the authoritarian censorship in China. Hysterical much, Jimbo? It’s actually a comparison many Europeans find distasteful - particularly since genuine repression and state censorship - from, for example, the STASI - is a living memory.

Wales: I believe Google's most likely response is going to be very transparent. I'm going to encourage them to be very transparent about what they are no longer linking to. Um. Which is what they do with, y'know, they share certain things with the site Chilling Effects, and so on.

When Google removes a link because of a copyright notice - something it originally said it couldn’t do, just as in this case - it provides an indirect link instead. However it's highly unlikely that Google can legally publish a direct link to information in this way: it still constitutes a link. Wales hasn’t thought it through.

But hold on. Marr wants to believe The Internet Is Broken - and he isn’t going to give up.

Marr: What is this going do to the price of the internet? If companies are going to spend more time sort of censoring and removing things and engaging in legal battles as seems inevitable?

Wales: It's not just a matter of the internet companies and the costs associated with that. We also have to be concerned with newspapers, who now find that Google will not link to certain stories if they're scared about it. And they're going to have to go through a legal process. Newspapers are financially in dire straits all the time anyway. Given the fragility of the free press, I think we should really step back and take another look.

The ruling clearly doesn’t apply to newspapers, who have a journalistic exemption. And indeed, if people stop bothering news sites to get their name's Google search results cleaned up and start bothering Google instead, that will be a good thing for news operations*. But Wales wants newspaper editors to think they’ll lose money.

Marr: Do you think this is workable, this attempt to seize power over the internet?

Wales: No, I don't think so. Because for one thing it only applies in Europe, but the internet is inherently global. When Google censors search results in China, they used to, they don't any more because they withdrew from China ... There are many many search engines who don't have any presence in Europe and won't abide by these rules in Europe.

There are more reasonable viewpoints out there. In the FT, Robert Shrimsley raised the example of “slut-shaming”, the Slane Girl case, who can easily be identified from photographs after an indiscretion was photographed at a pop festival. “People do stupid things and few merit perpetual global humiliation”.

Writing in the San Jose Mercury, Michael Fertik explained the process in detail - anticipating many of the points Wales made ten days later. He concluded:

"What's really at stake here is power: whether we believe that we, in this digital age where information lasts forever, should have some measure of agency or if we should cede our power entirely to the machine. I’m with the court: Human dignity is important, precious and deserves legal standing.”

Unfortunately such views were not reflected in Jimbo and Marr's one-sided discussion. And it's particularly odd that Marr, who has used European law to take out a "super-injunction" protecting his own privacy, should now forget the value of privacy rights to people slightly less wealthy than himself.

As Shrimsley reminded us, Google "is led by people who resist restraints on the web and have little regard for privacy. It has a smart lobbying operation and believes the appeal of its technology will protect it from lawmakers.”

Marr concluded by thanking Wales for Wikipedia - "which you created, and which changed the world”. ®

Bootnote

* We know this from personal experience at The Register, where we routinely receive everything from grovelling pleas to legal or even violent threats aimed at getting one of our articles removed so that it will in due course disappear from a Google search of somebody's name. It will be nice when Google has to lawyer up rather than us, since we did the work of finding and publishing the information in the first place and all they did was put ads next to a clip of it. - Ed