A few weeks ago, the European Union ruled that citizens had “the right to be forgotten” on the Internet, effectively opening up the floodgates for requests to have certain posts, articles, and other information removed from Google searches so as to make it more difficult to find. Now, according to report from Bloomberg Business Week, Google is bearing the brunt of those requests…12,000 of them, to be exact.

Of course, Google does not have the power to delete information from the internet entirely. The search engine merely gives users a vehicle to find articles, websites, and other posts based on keywords. What the EU wants Google to do, however, is give citizens an opportunity to have damaging, out-of-date, or irrelevant information about themselves removed from internet searches so that they can be forgotten. The threat of fines and other violation consequences will push Google to try to comply with each request it receives, but if the first day of requests was any indication, doing so is going to be impractical, expensive, and a huge blow to company productivity.

Google launched a website on May 29 to accept requests for data removal from EU citizens. The site got 12,000 requests in the first day alone, a number that obviously will not be the average, but which will still give Google a lot of extra work to sort through in the new few months when the “right to be forgotten” mandate is still new.

For his part, Google CEO Larry Page is not terribly worried about what the requests will do to Google financially. Since Google is a big company, Page said that it will not have any problem handling the new workload or the expense that it incurs. However, the CEO was concerned that the EU was setting a dangerous precedent for internet regulation that could lead to numerous dire consequences down the road. At best, Page thinks that this new inconvenience will be a blow to the innovation of the internet; at worst, he thinks that other governments may be encouraged by the EU’s stance to further censor the internet and rob their citizens of “freedom of information” rights.