Opinion

New Google ruling hides Wall Street pariah

SAN FRANCISCO — We didn’t forget Stan O’Neal. We just weren’t talking about him. That’s about to change. Big time.

That’s because when BBC Economics Editor Robert Peston did a Google search of his blog recently, there was a post missing. Instead of a 2007 post about O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch & Co., he got this message:

“We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your Web site in response to certain searches on European versions of Google.”

It seems the O’Neal post was scrubbed as part of a European Court of Justice ruling in May that ordered Google to delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it.

So far, it’s not clear who requested that the post be removed. But, as Peston notes, O’Neal’s legacy at one of the financial firms (Merrill was ultimately acquired by Bank of America at the center of the financial crisis) is certainly relevant — still. And let’s be realistic, who in the world is looking out for Stan O’Neal at this point other than Stan O’Neal?

Already it appears a law meant to give regular citizens the right to a new start is being abused by public figures who don’t like negative coverage, otherwise known as fair analysis.

Back in 2007 I wrote that O’Neal “ruled with a cool determination and, by some accounts, explosive temper. He diversified. He preserved and grew the brokerage. Merrill’s stock doubled. But his insistence to drive profit by taking on risk proved to be his undoing.”

Sorry if you can’t read that in Luxembourg.

Ultimately, it’s clear that this law is going to backfire on the courts and the public figures who think they can scrub the record and rewrite their on personal histories as told by the Internet.

After all, who was going to write about what a control freak O’Neal was, today?

Not me.