'Right to be forgotten' could threaten global free speech, say NGOs

The trouble with strong 1A supporters is that they pretend like the free speech restrictions in the US are not both arbitrary and frequently racially biased due to the slow functioning of the justice system. You cannot shout fire in a crowded theatre, you cannot make direct death threats, you cannot incite riots, you cannot share information as an attorney or as a government agent etc. There's tons of exceptions that have only an arbitrary distinction from European-style exceptions. A common point with all these 1A exceptions is that they apply to the benefit of property owners and people who are otherwise privileged.

I.e. Americans who are strong 1A supporters think these rights are intrinsic and protected by the state because the exceptions to free speech pretty much all work in their favour, so they don't mind them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_v._Black

Starting with that Germany example: there's a common pattern of saying "all Germany bans is Nazi propaganda, surely you don't object to that?", but it's not actually true. Germany bans 'insult', a category which produces upwards of 20,000 convictions per year. Disparaging the symbols of the state is prohibited, and a lèse-majesté law was present and occasionally enforced until January 2018. Distributing pornographic writing remains restricted, as does insulting a faith in a manner that could disturb the peace - both classes of law which are infamous around the world for enabling biased prosecutions along religious lines. And when it comes to the mechanisms of speech, Germany set the precedent on the infamously terrible 'link tax' rule being floated for the EU as a whole.

On to the question of the US First Amendment: 1A critics often have a blindspot about how the presence of extremely strong free speech protections anywhere helps people everywhere in the digital era.

The UK, for example, has ludicrous internet censorship standards ranging from banning hosting for large classes of content to ISP-level site blocking. (And it turns out those powers have been consistently used to enable copyright abusers and restrict LGBT content, exactly like free speech advocates predicted.) But the situation in the UK isn't terribly bad - because offending content is hosted under US laws and served back to the UK! We see this pattern all over. Turkish dissidents graffiti the IPs of US-hosted content to bypass DNS blocks. Chinese firewall-bypassers end up on Taiwanese and US sites for regime-critical news. Bangladeshi student protestors share videos on Firechat that eventually end up on Reddit under 1A protections. The 'right to be forgotten' itself acts as a bar to cursory investigation instead of full information hiding because US-based search retains removed results.

If free speech absolutism means saying "German and Chinese speech laws are equally unacceptable", then sure, that's absurd. But jumping from "Germany isn't totalitarian" to "1A stringency is needless because Germany's fine" is the same sort of mistake in the opposite direction.

Curious if HN has any ideas how to approach that issue?

Also I'd like to point out that many of the landmark cases establishing the doctrine of "imminent lawless action" were defending the rights of far-left political activists. I'm not sure I buy into your "free speech for the privileged" theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiske_v._Kansas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_v._California

The U.S. does the same, and expects the same. In the scenario of this case, Canada is demanding that Google remove infringement of a Canadian citizen's copyright from Google's server. Similarly, the U.S. is well-known for aggressively pursuing entities in other country's for violating U.S. copyright protections.

Google is not the good guy here, they're trying to protect their ability to distribute pirated content. And they have no legal basis for their refusal to comply.

Note that Canada has not stated that data on a US server must be censored "when a Canadian connects to it". Canada has stated that Google must remove the data from all of their servers, regardless of where it is accessed. Aka, it is not okay to pirate a Canadian citizen's content even when it's on a US server and being accessed by a US citizen.