Saturday, October 11, 2014

Argentina’s right to be forgotten

By Marcelo García
Politics & The Press

If Argentina were in Europe, it could seek to exercise the right to be forgotten and delete from the world’s search engines most of what has happened to the country over the last two months. Default, for instance, could cease to be associated to 2014 and instead remain in the Web archives of the turn of the century.

The government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has done every effort to escalate its conflict with the holdouts of last decade’s debt restructuring to a prominent place on the international agenda. It has a message for the world. This week, both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank made statements in support of the Argentine position that the world needs to draft new rules for sovereign debt exchanges. Kazakhstan, a country that might also want the world to forget there was ever a character called Borat, became this week the first country to issue bonds containing post-Argentine “Griefault” rules.

But still it seems the country has lost rather than gained reputation along the brawl with the vultures. This week, a financial sector monthly journal owned by the Financial Times featured the president in boxing gear in the process of being knocked out by the “vulture” Paul Singer. Could Google help sort that out?

Argentina, as the president likes to repeat, has been a “leading case” on this. A privilege? Not really, unless a nation is more concerned about its moral standing than its material wellbeing. With the immediate scenario still unclear on whether the administration will seek, and if so muster, an agreement with Paul Singer and his team of “global usurers,” reputation is both about branding that it is about economic survival.

So, would it be crazy to ask Google to delete the bad news? Weird as it sounds, this is what is happening out there.

A 1984-type debate is raging in Europe about the reach, roles and responsibilities in the enforcement of the “right to be forgotten” upheld by the European Court of Justice in May. The Court ruled in the case of a Spanish citizen who complained that the first item that came up in the Google search results when he typed his name was a tax debt item published by a Spanish newspaper in 1998. The situation has been resolved but his reputation was still being affected, he argued. After Google declined to delete the link from its results, the European Court ordered the search mammoth to remove certain links on request.

Which ones? This is when the plot thickens: even if the information is correct and its publication legal, search engines must comply in not showing the information if it is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.” There is an “unless”: if the issue involved is of “preponderant” public interest. Bad luck. Technically the actions of nations like Argentina are “of global public interest.” Not so quick...

The rationale Google is using to accept or reject the link-removal request is so far a mystery, only second in relevance to its search algorithm. Google has since May received some 120,000-link removal requests. It rejected most of them (59 percent) on several arguments, mostly related to the interest of the information to its users or the general public. The paradox of the situation is that by trying to limit Google’s power to harm the public’s privacy, the European Court has given Google more power to decide what stays and what goes from the public light.

This week, the New York Times reported that Google had deleted five of its stories from the search results. “Of the five articles that Google informed The Times about, three are intensely personal — two wedding announcements from years ago and a brief paid death notice,” explained the paper.

The other two articles are less about personal details than about reputation, the paper added. And one of them has an Argentine connection. It is a feature about a 1998 production Villa Villa by the Argentine ensemble De la Guarda. “Not a review, the article explored how the antic, acrobatic show was managing to get a generation raised on MTV interested in seeing live theatre,” writes the New York Times, not fully grasping the rationale.

There is another Argentine link to the European Union’s move. Around the same time the European Court issued its verdict, the Argentine Supreme Court held a hearing on a case of private filed against Google Argentina by model Belén Rodríguez, who argued her name was being associated to porn sites. The Court is yet to deliver its verdict. Argentine courts, like its US counterparts, have more often than not upheld freedom of expression over other rights, in this case privacy.

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The government did not forget — or suddenly remembered — it had a major conflict with the country’s largest media conglomerate. The AFSCA broadcasting administration’s decision to revive the battle with Grupo Clarín by rejecting its plan to voluntarily adapt to anti-trust rules introduced five years ago lacks both the timing and the chances to deliver an outcome before the end of the president’s term next year. The case will go back to the courts, possibly indefinitely. And it will likely be an extra front the Kirchner era will leave open for the next administration to tackle.

@mjotagarcia