This is nonsense. Google isn't making policy decisions about censorship and privacy, nor should they be. Instead, they're assessing when it is and isn't legally risky / expensive to return search result X to a user in country Y. At that level, privacy requirements and censorship requirements are functionally identical.
Just because the EU's legal restrictions are grounded in privacy doesn't mean another jurisdiction's won't be grounded in censorship. Which is one thing if those restrictions apply to search results intended for that jurisdiction and quite another if those restrictions are applied worldwide.
You are still reasoning from Google's viewpoint. There are other viewpoints. Such as citizens of the EU, who have decided to empower the EU with laying down laws dictating what companies can do with their data. If google wishes to continue to operate in Europe then it will have to comply with the law of the land.
Whether that is functionally identical with censorship or not is another debate.
We can have that debate, but it will end in some gray area where a convicted criminal that has served his sentence should probably be able to clear his name in the search engines and where a politician that was caught in some scandal will not be able to do the same (because he was a public figure at the time).
Censorship requests can simply be stonewalled until the company is sued and then the judges can side with Google or the claimant on a case-by-case basis.
Frankly, the only perspective I care about in this mess is mine - that of a non-EU Google user. I'm only reasoning from Google's because I want to understand how these EU regulations are likely to impact me. Now that EU regulators are making it clear they won't be satisified by compliance tailored to their jurisdiction, it's clear that they will. Which is just wrong.
There's no sensible reason for EU regulations to have anything to do with the search results that I (as a non-EU citizen, searching from outside the EU, most likely using entirely non-EU servers, network connections and so on) see. I agree that the EU has the economic and political power to impose these regulations (on Google, Bing, Yahoo, ...). I just think that, even though they can, they shouldn't.
This is exactly the same sort of extraterritorial bullshit that drives the EU (and EU citizens) nuts when the US does it. See, for example, the US government demanding, from Microsoft, the emails of EU citizens stored on EU servers in response to a US search warrant. Or the volumes of requirements (tax monitoring, sanctions compliance and so on) the US imposes on non-US banks even when their only US connection is they sometimes transfer dollars between non-US customers.
EU citizens and EU regulators might care deeply about the "right to be forgotten", but if they think that endorsing and emulating the US's extraterritorial grandstanding in its name is going to be anything but a gigantic net loss for European privacy, they're kidding themselves, at best. Google's response to the "right to be forgotten" has been disappointing and frustrating (though I doubt we'd agree on why). What similarly powerful governments (e.g. US, China, ...) end up doing with the new tools the EU is forging to enforce that right will be terrifying.
Just because the EU's legal restrictions are grounded in privacy doesn't mean another jurisdiction's won't be grounded in censorship. Which is one thing if those restrictions apply to search results intended for that jurisdiction and quite another if those restrictions are applied worldwide.