European privacy threatens American freedom of expression

An interesting take from the New York Times' Adam Liptak on the Italian google ruling earlier in the week.

He writes that whilst in

one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

in another,

it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.