Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

How long ago had a district attorney in another area come a cropper, very publicly, and fled to a psychiatric institution for a time, and finally pled guilty to some charges and done some time in the county jail, in a cell furnished with a recliner and other comforts of home?

I could remember the story quite well, having broken it and then covered it for months. But I could not remember what year it had happened. Thank goodness for Google! Before long I turned up some images of newspapers where the D’Arcy story was Page One off and on for months.

A ruling by the European Court of Justice (the European Union equivalent of our SCOTUS) just days ago might have ramifications that would place a “sunset” on such news of bygone times, news old enough to be history, at least as it affects individuals. Maybe that 1974 story would be gone now, if this ruling were effective here, automatically.

Last Tuesday the ECJ ruled that Google must delete search results concerning the attachment of a certain Spanish citizen’s property for bad debts, because it is long enough ago to be “forgotten” or to have become invisible to search engines.

Some observers see the ruling as the beginning of the end of lots of archived materials that might feel embarrassing to some people. (Oh, and don’t forget, corporations are people too, at least in our country. So could information about what Pittsburgh Corning did or failed to do, in the 1960s, still be accessed online, under this new ruling? Of course, it would still be in books, such as Paul Brodeur’s “Expendable Americans.”)

Already there was the 1995 Privacy Directive, in Europe. The new ruling helps define its reach. It may not be as sweeping as some pundits seem to think, but it is significant enough to have social media and search companies’ bloomers in a bunch.

European privacy authorities would have to sign off before search or archive companies would have to delete information.

The new ruling says that Google, in this case,and presumably search channels categorically, are considered “data controllers.” They are controlling or processing data when they provide it in response to our online queries.

That puts Google and other search engines under the jurisdiction of the European privacy law, not just with regard to this “right to be forgotten.”

One factor in the trigger case was Google’s “presence” in Spain, where it has an advertising subsidiary. But it has presences or bases in numerous countries.

Some think there may be a “Snowden effect” that is part of the ECJ’s new activism. Knowing that even heads of state are among those whose communications are gathered and retained by our NSA has been troubling to many in the EU.

Last year the CJEU’s Advocate-General issued an opinion that search engine service providers are not subject to the Data Protection Directive in connection with data appearing on the web pages they process. But the court disagreed.

New privacy legislation is in the mill, in the EU. This seems aimed at making it more difficult to export data to the US or give US-based search companies use of European information.

The European nations that have wanted more privacy protections, and chafed at the laxity of those that didn’t, will now have better tools for getting the privacy provisions applied.

Google is expected to bring whatever influence it can to bear in the shaping of new privacy laws. Individual European nations and the European Parliament seem likely to maintain the status quo in that there already is a privacy measure that doesn’t need to change much to be enforced more strictly, thanks to the new ruling. There is likely to be intense lobbying by Google other search companies, and social media biggies too, in Brussels.

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As I write this on Sunday evening, an agreement between AT&T and DirecTV is only hours old. AT&T will pay $48.5 billion for the satellite TV company.

This is the latest in a dizzying series of tilts in communications  and telecommunications balances of power. Just months ago Comcast agreed to buy Time-Warner Cable for $45 billion. Sprint wants to merge with T-Mobile USA.

Will this mean more meaningful competition for our communications and media access dollars? Or will it lead to too much market concentration, and steeper fees for us?

This consumer would love to be able to buy regular phone service, cell service, TV/FM signal and internet access from one provider, at a combined cost lower than I am paying.

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Urs Hozle, Google’s eighth employee, helped scale infrastructure for cloud computing.

Amazon’s Werner Vogels drove expansion of Amazon Web Services.

Chris Kemp used to be CIO at NASA Ames. He is another cloud computing trailblazer, as founder and CEO of Nebula, offering IaaS (infrastructure as a service).

Microsoft’s Doug Hauger heads the company’s Azure cloud platform.

Wa-a-ay back in 1999 Parker Harris and Marc Benioff were founders of Salesforce, one of the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) products.

Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi founded Dropbox, creating an early backup and storage service, one of the first broadly adopted ones.

Taylor Rhodes heads Rackspace, a cloud infrastructure hosting company.

Brett Caine was the head of the Citrix GoToMeeting online video conferencing service.

Devices learned to share and sync thanks to Evernote, founded by Phil Lubin.

David Friend and Jeff Flowers gave us Carbonite. I was an early adopter, when it was in beta in 2005. It was and is a great way to do backup in the cloud.

Cumulative nimbleness personified, those are some cloud pioneers.