The Economics of the Right to be Forgotten

Byung-Cheol Kim and Jin Yeub Kim

No 15-02, Working Papers from NET Institute

Abstract: We offer an economic analysis of the right to be forgotten (RTBF)-- the right to remove links from the search results --through a legal dispute game between a petitioner and a search engine. Our analysis suggests that the global expansion of the RTBF does not necessarily increase the likelihood of link removals. We also find that the RTBF expansion can either improve or reduce welfare from a social perspective. Therefore, the ongoing debate should be guided by the perspective of achieving a socially optimal level of link removals rather than of a conflict between privacy rights and free speech.

Keywords: right to be forgotten; privacy; litigation; search engine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D82 K20 K41 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2015-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.netinst.org/Kim_Kim_15-02.pdf (application/pdf)
no

Related works:
Journal Article: The Economics of the Right to Be Forgotten (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:net:wpaper:1502

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from NET Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Economides ().