Re: and so, ad infinitum
> "He" (Stan O'Neal) didn't actually make the complaint.
So the complaint should have been rejected at the first hurdle. Only the individual or someone with delegated authority can complain, not some random third party.
Note Preston's comment at the end:
"The implication is that oblivion was requested not by anyone who appears in the blog itself (O'Neal is the only person I mention in my column) but by someone named in the comments written by readers underneath the blog. "
The people who commented on the post have this same 'right to be embarrassed about something they once wrote on the internet forgotten' as the subject of the blog post itself - so if one of them, who posted under their own name, manages to get Google to forget their embarrassing comment, then searches for that person's name won't include that particular piece that Preston has written - and it won't (just as it appears not to have done) affect searches for O'Neal.
And if that's what's happened, it is not a random third party; it's Joe Bloggs asking for this comment by (or mentioning) Joe Bloggs to be removed.
Just to confirm, searching for Stan O'Neal currently brings up quite a lot of articles about this nonsense, but adding +site:bbc.co.uk shows the 'removed' article half way down the first page.
And the weather forecast for that teacup is: Stormy.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
