‘The Right to be Forgotten’-a new dilemma for Microsoft and Google

Following the moves made by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), as of last week, has decided to take some decisions related to the ‘right to be forgotten’ option, an option the European court order has finalized as a result of the users asking this to be done. Similar to Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has made available to its users a form that they will be able to download and fill and let their requests be considered and catered to. The form is more elaborate as compared to the one being offered by Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). These requests include, for instance, statements such as Bing does not effectively search the appropriate links when the keywords are inserted into the search engine, theses searches are often unrelated as well as irrelevant. The requests will be thoroughly investigated by Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) in light of numerous point of views and according to their findings, the company shall decide whether the requests are fair enough to be acknowledged. While Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has challenged the ‘right to question’ law innumerable times, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) chooses to remain quiet on the subject.

The Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) team has formulated a strategy according to which they shall take into account the privacy of every person and give them freedom of speech and communication as well as provide the appropriate information as implemented by the European law. They have also stated that just because some individual filed a request does not necessarily mean the search results shall be prevented from appearing on the search engine or shut down.

Earlier this year, the European dwellers were permitted to act in accordance with the ‘right to be forgotten’, following the orders from the European Court of Justice. According to this, if European people were of the view that some information provided via the Internet was inappropriate, distressing or troublesome, they could have it eliminated from search results that appear as a result of typing keywords in search engines. The same could also be possible if the information was not up to date, was unnecessary, exaggerated or simply not required.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) started its dealing with requests in May and has up till now collected as many as 70000 requests. Last month, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) extracted a specific number of links that had been complained against. Most of these were removed permanently while a couple of them were returned. Since, the laws and authorities concerned with the protection of data have not outlined what sort of content is to be considered worth removing and which requests have to be ignored, the company has to critically analyze and assess the links themselves.

In Europe, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) predominates the search engine market by 90%, a significantly high percentage, while the remaining 10% is controlled by other search engines, the relatively smaller ones, and amongst these, Bing happens to be the most noticeable one. Therefore, for the smaller search engines, lesser usage means lesser ‘right to be forgotten’ requests as compared to Google (NASDAQ:GOOG).

The financial situation of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is that the market cap has totaled to 369.61 B and their range in 52 weeks has fluctuated between 30.84 and 45.71. On Thursday, the stock on the market opened at $45.45.