One of the legitimate concerns raised by stakeholder companies is that it should not be up to the private sector—search engines or organizations responsible for social media—to balance individual rights. Obviously, that is not a frivolous position.
However, you need to look at the practicalities of the issue. As I say in my paper, as a matter of law, all organizations, including search engines, have an obligation to develop a process to ensure that the substantive rights are respected, namely to the accuracy of information. I think that's a legal obligation they have under the current law. Does it make it proper for them to balance individual rights? Certainly, that's something to consider because it's not frequent.
As a practical matter, in Europe, we have seen hundreds of thousands of these requests made since the Google Spain decision of 2014. Should a tribunal be created? Normally, a tribunal of some sort would be created to adjudicate these requests. Should we create a tribunal that would look at hundreds of thousands of these requests every year? That would be more in line with the nature of the balancing that is at play, but I don't think it's very practical.
Although that may not be where people would go intuitively, to ask companies to develop processes, as they are bound to do under the law, to have a first decision about these applications—of course, subject to the rights of individuals who are not happy to make a complaint to our office, independent tribunal, and ultimately, the courts—is a workable system, I think. It's not a perfect system, but it's a workable system.