It's interesting how this relates to the "right to be forgotten." Some interpret that to mean that the content will still exist, but will not be indexed by search engines.
If so, then we are evolving into two Nets, the searchable one and the - what? - one you have to follow links into? Links with grave warnings on them?
I'm not sure this is entirely bad but it's weird. Will we also have pirate offshore search engines that ignore robots.txt and refuse to deindex?
Also see: the internet archive of things they aren't allowed to show because of robots.txt
I agree that these issues are closely related, and one people's opinions on them will be correlated. However, much of the time we can find solutions that will almost everyone happy, e.g., removing just the name of individuals from retracted stories (an idea suggested by someone else in this thread). Importantly, almost no one thinks the mistakes of the newspapers have a right to be forgotten, or more precisely, that newspapers have an defensible interest in erasing the details of their errors and leaving only a summary (written by themselves!) describing the error and declaring a retraction.
