Americans shouldn’t demand a ‘right to be forgotten’ online

[Commentary] Should the Federal Trade Commission force Google to respect people’s “right to be forgotten”? No.

First, any FTC action likely would run afoul of the First Amendment. The FTC wouldn’t mandate the removal of information from the Internet; Web sites wouldn’t be taken down. But they would become much harder to locate, with the FTC effectively prescribing what speech should be findable and what should not. The government shouldn’t entangle itself.