In May 2014, the European Court of Justice made a historic decision that caused many people to think differently about the internet and who we are online.

Mario Costeja González, a Spaniard, had long-since paid back his debts from the 90s, but two short newspaper notices from that period about the auction for his foreclosed home still showed up prominently when someone searched for his name online. He challenged Google to remove the respective articles from its search results — and won.

Subsequently, Google, and all other search engines, had to provide a mechanism by which people could request removal of a specific search result if the content it linked to is “inadequate, irrelevant or excessive”.

Critics argued that shady politicians and criminals were likely to abuse the ruling to white-wash their online presence, but actual data on the nature of requests was missing. Despite calls from numerous academics for more transparency, Google did not share statistics on the requests it received. Google is taking decisions that are publicly relevant. As such, it is becoming almost like a court or government, but without the fundamental checks on its power.

The numbers graphed below come from Google's own Transparency Report. The source code of the website actually contained more data than the report visualised in its front-end. About three months ago, the extra data disappeared but snapshots on WayBack Machine, the ‘Archive of the Internet’, are a testimony to its prior existence.