The BBC is publishing a list of articles removed under the EU's "right to be forgotten" law:

The BBC will begin - in the "next few weeks" - publishing the list of removed URLs it has been notified about by Google.

Mr Jordan said the BBC had so far been notified of 46 links to articles that had been removed.

I'm with Jeff Jarvis, who argued in May that the right to be forgotten is a hopelessly misguided law:

The court has undertaken to control knowledge — to erase what is already known — which in concept is offensive to an open and modern society and in history is a device used by tyrannies; one would have hoped that European jurists of all people would have recognized the danger of that precedent.

The court has undermined the very structure of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention, the link — the underpinning of the web itself — by making now Google (and next perhaps any of us) liable just for linking to information. Will newspapers be forced to erase what they link to or quote? Will libraries be forced to take metaphoric cards out of their catalogs?

This is one of those laws that starts with good intentions but is obviously prone to widespread abuse with serious implications. It doesn't help that each company's implementation may be different, but the underlying principle is flawed. If information is incorrect, libelous or otherwise harmful, the law typically provides other routes to remove it. A court can now essentially adjudicate that published content is out of date and should not be referred to.

There's a still deeper issue, which is that search is our gateway to the Internet, and whereas we now have a healthy market of competing web browsers, most of us rely on a single provider to find our information. If content is erased from Google, it often might as well cease to exist entirely. Many web users even ignore URLs, using Google search to reach every single resource on the web.

Social discovery mitigates this to some extent: you can reach this unlinked BBC post because I've posted a link, and I in turn saw it via my social networks. Google also has a little competition via Bing and the brilliant DuckDuckGo.

But even if we use alternatives, the problem remains that we are reliant on a very small number of organizations, who are vulnerable to links to resources being pulled.

The upshot is this: we are in need for new, more distributed methods of finding information, that are resilient to points of failure, whether they're imposed by states or corporations. While there are peer to peer alternatives like YaCy, which are certainly interesting, there is still no simple, beautiful alternative to the status quo.

In the meantime, we need to hold our governments, and the services we rely on, to a higher standard. The BBC's choice to publish a list of retracted links is a good one, in conjunction with efforts like the Legally Restricted HTTP error code. Freedom to publish is a privilege that must be protected; let's all do the same.