I'll start by endorsing the distinction that Professor Scassa made between data protection and a right to deletion and a right to be forgotten, because that is a key distinction.
The way it was handed down was the first problem we saw. There was a decision by the European Court of Justice that didn't even really mention freedom of expression, and included statements that, for example, the right to privacy generally trumps people's right to obtain information. There was a lack of proper consideration of the rights that were being infringed. That would be the first one. With that decision, which was relatively bare, providing the only guidance at the outset at least that Google was going to have in implementing that, it was hugely problematic, because you create this enormous new responsibility without a huge amount of guidance on how it's supposed to be implemented.
As I mentioned briefly before, putting this on the private sector is hugely problematic, because this is a very tricky decision. It involves balancing different rights against one another, and it involves considering the overall public interest. Google is absolutely not equipped to do that. Even for a company of their size, this is something that you need judicial or quasi-judicial decision-makers to take on. Saddling it onto the private sector was also a significant mistake. I think you saw that the floodgates sort of came open. I looked it up in the interim, and I saw 348,000 requests to remove links by Google.
When I say that I have a certain amount of sympathy with regard to a few limited cases of where the right to be forgotten could be applied, I think it's a challenging thing to implement in terms of just applying it to those extreme cases. I think the European example shows that once the right is implemented, the floodgates kind of come open, and you have a huge amount of legitimate or accurate information, or perfectly relevant information, that people would request deletion for.