Recently, democracy took it on the chin. The European Court of Justice issued a bizarre ruling that Internet search engines must remove links to Web pages that provide embarrassing information about an individual’s past. This means that debtors who shafted their creditors in 1997 or Euro-frat-boys who posed naked with shaving cream adorning their private parts in 2003 can have the links to these mortifying images or documents removed from the Web forever.

To find this compromising data, people will now have to work much…