Google appears to have deleted its political ad archive for the EU

Responsibility for political ad archives

• Strong disagreement over whether Google has any duty to preserve these records.
• One camp: it’s unreasonable to expect a private company to store data “for free” indefinitely; if it matters, others should have archived it.
• Others counter: advertisers paid Google; political ads were not a free service, so treating the archive as a pure gift is misleading.

Governments, regulation, and the EU angle

• Some argue that archiving political ads should be a government or EU-level responsibility, not left to a platform.
• Pushback: governments can’t see inside Google without legal mandates, and can’t always be trusted with such power or records about themselves.
• Several point out that the archive remains for non‑EU countries; many suspect EU political-ad or data-protection rules and fear of fines motivated the EU-only removal, though the exact legal trigger is unclear.

Digital commons, monopoly power, and obligations

• Debate over whether platforms like Google function as de facto “digital commons” and thus owe the public higher duties (e.g., not deleting politically important data).
• Critics reject this framing, saying these are private, expensive infrastructures; others reply that network effects and monopoly power justify treating them more like utilities or common carriers.

Democracy, transparency, and rhetoric

• Some consider deletion of EU political ad history dangerous for accountability, enforcement of rules, and understanding targeted campaigns that were otherwise hard to see.
• Others say this is overblown: Google deleted its own records, not “our” history, and the author should have anticipated loss.
• Distinction is drawn between ordinary ads (like TV) and micro‑targeted political ads, where archives uniquely enable scrutiny.

Archiving practices and community response

• Multiple comments stress the rule: if it’s not on your own storage, you can’t rely on it persisting.
• An archivist notes platforms are not archives; that’s why professional archiving exists.
• Community members rush to snapshot the data via BigQuery “time travel,” export tables, and upload them to archive.org; others call in Archive Team and data-hoarding communities.

Article framing and Google’s behavior

• Some see the headline (“erased history”) as implying censorship; others find the article itself mostly factual.
• Many agree it’s within Google’s rights to remove EU data but criticize the silent, no‑notice reversal of a long‑standing “transparency” feature.