What is free speech if the state acts to prevent anyone from finding what you published?<p>Imagine a despotic regime that allowed it's citizens to publish or say whatever they wanted, with the only restriction being it had to be in an empty auditorium.<p>Is Baidu or Yandex going to comply with RTBF? As soon as people know you can't find something in Google globally, they'll just work around it. Metacrawlers will return which just query every search engine.
I wouldn't call it 'free speech'. That's what Google is marketing it as, but it's really 'privacy law'. Nothing about RTBF is about preventing people from speaking, people are still free to put whatever they want on the Internet, wherever they want to. However, stories which violate an individual's privacy which do not have relevance to the public interest are being restricted from being a permanent stain on their reputation.<p>(And the only potential First Amendment issue in the US, is because somehow the Citizens United decision gives our companies Constitutional rights, which is silly.)<p>Arguably, France's problem with Google's refusal to implement this globally is that Google doesn't prevent French users from visiting other countries' Google websites, like say, google.ca. So Google isn't really providing a good faith effort to uphold the French law, even in France.