W

ho could have imagined in the early 1990s, when many of us first went online with our dial-up modems, that Internet connection would be as essential to our children as food and water?
Sit down for 10 minutes at any cafe and the query will not be the menu, but '€œis there Wi-Fi?'€

Our children find it incredulous that way back when, going online meant being restricted to a work desk with cables.

Those 56 kilobits per second transfer rates defy their belief as they zip through the World Wide Web on a 4G broadband connection to download the latest 50 megabyte update of Angry Birds.

And they still complain of a slow connection!

According to the Ookla Net Index, which compares the results of its speedtest application by users around the world, Indonesian users have an average connection speed of 5.67 mbps, placing it 139th out of 198 countries.

Singapore tops the list with a lightning 108 mbps, while at the bottom are Benin and Gambia with a snail'€™s pace of 1.1 mbps.

Age-old borders and taboos no longer apply in this limitless world. The net is creating a new culture in itself. In the same way that Gutenberg revolutionized our mental view of consuming and exchanging knowledge, the modern day Internet revolutionaries have accelerated our cognitive database to a point where nothing is unfound.

Information peddled without restriction for benefit and deceit.

As with any technology that has become so ubiquitous and requisite, the norms that govern it have outpaced our traditional congruence of how things should be.

Porn at a click of a mouse changed the way we educate our children. Julian Assange challenged our conceptions of transparency. Facebook and Twitter pushed the dynamic of virtual relationships. As journalists run out of breath trying to keep up with the glut of ineffectual information inundating the public domain.

One such debate soon to rage our netizens is the catchy phrase '€œthe right to be forgotten'€.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin once described the Internet as '€œa vast collection of completely uncontrolled heterogeneous documents'€.

The practice of '€œdelisting'€ has been in practice among search engines for over a decade. But it reached a legal apex last year when the European Court of Justice ruled in favor of a Spanish man who demanded a search result regarding a 1998 article in La Vanguardia newspaper be delisted.

The article in question referred to the auction of his home because of outstanding debts.

The problem was that despite having cleared his debts, the article still showed up on a Google search 16 years later.

The court described the grounds for the delisting as links or information on individuals which were '€œirrelevant, outdated, objectionable, incorrect, inadequate or misleading'€.

The jurisprudence set by the court sparked a wave of public delisting requests to Google.

It is believed that since the ruling, Google has received over 220,000 related to comprising a total of 789,496 links. Google set up an internal committee to process these requests and reportedly removed over 264,000 of these links.

Google, however, has also maintained that the removal only applies to its Europe-based domains, i.e. google.uk;
google.fr; google.de, but not the worldwide domain of google.com.

Closer to home these issues have increasingly come forth. Media organizations have begun receiving requests, directly or through a lawyer'€™s note, of an individual demanding that a particular item be taken down from the web.

There is as yet no standard for such requests.

A case in point relates to an Indonesian man who was identified by the courts as being on the law'€™s '€œwanted list'€.

The man, however, fought all the way to the Supreme Court and several years later had the decision and the case overturned.

The media, however, did not realize the latest developments.

The man, through his lawyers, demanded that all articles related to his case be taken down from the media'€™s website. Offers to update the article were rejected, ignoring the fact that somewhere in this very big world of the Internet some form of the original article may well exist in other domains.

Immediately one can weigh the philosophical conundrums that are bound to arise.

Yes, individuals have a right to be presented on the Internet in an accurate and relevant manner. However, opening up the process to summarily delistings may allow the many with a questionable path to hide past improprieties.

Can, for example, Comr. Gen. Budi Gunawan, who has been in the eye of a public maelstrom, seek to '€œdelist'€ stories about him published on the Internet in the past month?

Another issue is who judges what is allowed to be delisted. Will it be private parties such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing? Or will it require a court injunction?

The European Union recently also passed guidelines to assess whether requests to be delisted from search engine results or to be '€œforgotten'€ are legitimate by identifying 13 criteria for consideration.

Among these include exceptions for delisting requests when an individual plays a role in public life and there is demand for information about the person.

Delistings should be made if the available personal information results in the individual being at risk.

We are the merely on the verge of a great Internet freedom debate that will rage for years and evolve through generations. It is a debate we should engage and embrace together for the common good.

Whatever the outcome, it is still better than erecting state-sponsored firewalls of information. Because, be it freedom to information or freedom to be forgotten, the essence is that the flow of information should be managed, not restricted.