Vint Cerf attacks European internet policy

Vint Cerf, often called the father of the internet, said that the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ online was “not possible to achieve”.

He told The Telegraph, “You can’t go out and remove content from everybody’s computer just because you want the world to forget about something. I don’t think it’s a practical proposition at all.” Cerf warned “It’s very, very hard to get the internet to forget things that you don’t want it to remember because it’s easy to download and copy and reupload files again later.” He added that “The analogue [equivalent of this digital idea] is terrifying; if somebody said ‘I want everyone to forget about this book that I published because it’s embarrassing’, how would you implement that? You would have to break in to people’s homes and take the book off the bookshelves. There’s some legal issues with that and it seems to me that it shouldn’t be any easier in the online world.”