Last week, the European Court of Justice (E.C.J.)—the E.U.’s equivalent of the Supreme Court—issued a ruling on the “right to be forgotten,” which grants Google users the right to have links about themselves removed from Google’s search results. Google has to scrub any material that a user wants taken down, as long as removing it doesn’t hurt the public interest. The decision applies to nearly anything found on the Internet— legal records, photos, even lawfully published news stories—and, in the words of the E.U. Justice Commissioner, Viviane Reding, represents “a clear victory for the protection of the personal data of Europeans.” In the court’s view, Google isn’t merely an aggregator or organizer of Web content. Rather, it acts as a “controller” of that content, and it therefore has a greater responsibility for the privacy of its users. The burden now falls on the company to prove that old content still has a reason to exist. Google will have to comply with user requests to erase data that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” given “the time that had elapsed.” For all the court’s enthusiasm about this right, gaping questions remain about implementing the ruling. What will be the criteria to decide whether something remains “relevant” to the public interest? How much time will need to pass for someone to be “forgotten”? (And, of course, how will Google handle the onslaught of takedown requests?)