HURBAIN v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT which the information was disseminated online). It was not possible, however, to take schematic rules on the use, publication and deletion of information from other contexts and apply these to determine whether the passage of time gave rise to a claim to protection. 119. Lastly, the Federal Constitutional Court held that striking a balance between the different fundamental rights at stake entailed taking into account the fact that there were various means of affording protection against the continued dissemination of old articles online. In deciding whether there was a right to protection against such dissemination, an intermediate solution between the two extremes of complete deletion of individualised information on the one hand and an unlimited requirement to tolerate the availability of such information on the other might first be sought on the basis of the interests of the opposing parties. More specifically, it was necessary to consider to what extent the operator of an online archive had the means of influencing access to and dissemination of the articles concerned on the Internet in order to protect the data subject. This applied particularly to search engines, which played a key role in the dissemination of information on the Internet. The court noted that the balancing exercise should seek to ensure that the measures taken were in fact sufficiently effective and were also reasonable for the media outlet operating the archive. 120. While, in the view of the Federal Constitutional Court, it was primarily incumbent upon the ordinary courts, which enjoyed wide discretion, to decide which detailed requirements operators of online archives must meet, the aim was to strike a balance that preserved unrestricted access to the original texts to the greatest extent possible, while also ensuring that where protection was merited in the individual case – especially in relation to name-based searches via search engines – sufficient limitations were put in place. 121. The Federal Constitutional Court concluded that the Federal Court of Justice had not conducted an adequate assessment of the harm caused to the complainant as a result of the further dissemination of the news reports under the changed circumstances resulting from the passage of time. It added that, given that the general availability of the articles had seriously impaired the complainant’s rights, the decision of the Federal Court of Justice had failed to address nuanced possibilities for protection and thus a compromise that, as a less restrictive means, might be more reasonable for the defendant than removing the articles in question or altering them by electronically redacting the complainant’s name. 2. Federal Constitutional Court judgment 1 BvR 276/17 of 6 November 2019 (“Right to be forgotten II”) 122. In a second judgment the Federal Constitutional Court examined the scope and content of the “right to be forgotten” in the context of a dispute between the complainant and a search engine. The individual in question 45