France somehow rejects Google’s appeal, setting risky ‘right to be

Google is keen to limit the Right to be Forgotten rules – which are backed by the European Council of Justice – to relatively local waters, and while some thinkers believe that it is a meaningless system without global coverage, it is actively disagreeing with that.

The ruling grants European Union residents the right to ask Google to remove links to news articles, social media posts, and other material, but doesn’t require Google to automatically delist the material.

If the company refuses to comply with the request, CNIL can levy small fines against the company, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Google Inc.’s informal appeal of a French data-protection watchdog’s call to extend the so-called right to be forgotten to all its websites was rejected by the regulator, opening up the Internet search provider to possible fines.

Since Google’s appeal has been rejected, the company must now comply with the notice, the CNIL said. But with nearly all information searches today beginning with search engines (and it is all search engines that are affected, not just Google), censoring search results effectively amounts to censoring what the world’s population is allowed to know. “It simply requests full observance of European legislation by non European players offering their services in Europe”. In order to be effective, the protection granted to a European citizen must apply to the search engine as a whole, even if this has one-off effects outside of this territory.

Google has granted about 40 per cent of the almost 320,000 requests it has received since then, but it has refused to de-list the links on its global sites like Google.com, instead only de-listing them on European versions like Google.fr or Google.de.

Google reiterated its opposition to the legal decision after the ruling.

Contrary to what Google has stated, this decision does not show any willingness on the part of the CNIL to apply French law extraterritorially.

“But as a matter of principle, we respectfully disagree with the idea that a single national Data Protection Authority should determine which webpages people in other countries can access via search engines”, said a spokesman for the company.