Algopolio’s Landmark Case Against Google and the Erosion of the Right to Be Forgotten

Source: Il Sole 24 Ore – “The Landmark Case Against Google: ‘The Right to Be Forgotten Trampled’”, 16 December 2025

When the right to be forgotten becomes an automated procedure

The Il Sole 24 Ore article describes a landmark case that brings into sharp focus a central issue of contemporary digital power: the growing gap between formally recognised rights and the practices actually applied by major platforms. At the centre of the dispute is Google and its handling of de-indexing requests under the right to be forgotten. According to the claimants, the process has been reduced to a standardised procedure, incapable of substantively assessing individual cases.

It is within this framework that the class action promoted by Professor Vincenzo Morabito, a scholar of economics and digital innovation, together with the association Algopolio, takes shape. Its aim is to restore the right to be forgotten to a sphere of effective legal protection, rather than leaving it as a matter of mere formal compliance.

Automatism that produces real harm

The case highlights how the rejection of de-indexing requests can have concrete and serious consequences for the individuals concerned: damaged reputations, lost job opportunities, and permanent exposure to information that is no longer current or relevant. As reported, the lack of a case-by-case assessment risks turning the right to be forgotten into a bureaucratic exercise, stripped of its original function of rebalancing digital memory and personal dignity.

The class action promoted by Algopolio arises precisely from this refusal to accept that individual rights can be managed as automated flows, without human responsibility or decision-making transparency.

Digital memory as structural power

The deepest issue raised by the article concerns Google’s role as a custodian of collective memory. When a platform concentrates the ability to archive, index and render personal information perpetually accessible, it exercises a form of power that goes far beyond a technological service.

The right to be forgotten was created to limit this asymmetry. If its application is instead delegated to opaque and standardised systems, the right loses its effectiveness and the platform’s power is reinforced. This is the structural distortion that the class action seeks to bring before the court.

A battle that concerns everyone

This landmark case is not an isolated episode, but a precedent with potentially systemic effects. It concerns anyone exposed to a permanent digital memory that is no longer proportionate or contextualised. It is a battle about fundamental rights in the algorithmic age: the right to reputation, to work, and to the possibility of not being forever defined by a fragment of the past.