The Court of Justice’s decision, so often reduced to the legal and technical considerations related to the deletion or de-linking of personal data, was in fact a key inflection point at which democracy began to claw back rights to the future tense from the powerful forces of a new surveillance capitalism determined to claim unilateral authority over the digital future. Instead, the court’s analysis claimed the future for the human way, rejecting the inevitability of Google’s search-engine technology and recognizing instead that search results are the contingent products of the specific economic interests that drive the action from within the belly of the machine: "The operator of a search engine is liable to affect significantly the fundamental rights to privacy and to the protection of personal data. In the light of the potential seriousness of the interference" with those interests, "it cannot be justified by merely the economic interest which the operator of such an engine has in that processing."

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 184