Google's independent advisory council says Europe's Right to Be Forgotten ruling should be contained within the continent and that its reach shouldn't extend to .com domains.
The advisory council is composed of independent experts who were invited by Google and tasked with helping the search engine company strike the perfect balance of policy that respects consumer privacy and does the least harm to the public's ability to access information.
The independent council helps Google establish the criteria for what constitutes a legitimate request to be forgotten. The advisory body also confirms what Google already believed when it asserted that global .com domains shouldn't be affected by the Right to Be Forgotten ruling.
Google told the advisory council that 95 percent of searches in Europe are routed through local versions of the search engine, such as Google.eu. In light of that information the council, in a report, indicated that delisting information from Europe's local version of Google Search should be sufficient in complying with the ruling of a country's High Court on the matter.
Delisting outdated information at the request of European users, removing all instances of the data from all Google variants, would offer more assurance of absolute protection, but the council's majority conclusion is that there are "competing interests" that are bigger than the protection of an individual, the advisory council stated in its report:
"There is a competing interest on the part of users outside of Europe to access information via a name-based search in accordance with the laws of their country, which may be in conflict with the delistings afforded by the ruling," stated the council's report. "These considerations are bolstered by the legal principle of proportionality and extraterritoriality in application of European law."
The council also concluded that there are competing interests from users inside Europe who would like to use other search engines besides the ones available exclusively and locally.
After listening to evidence about the ability to block international sites, the council was also concerned about a government's ability to truly block specific websites and the precedence such a move would set.
"The Council has concerns about the precedent set by such measures, particularly if repressive regimes point to such a precedent in an effort to 'lock' their users into heavily censored versions of search results," said the report. "It is also unclear whether such measures would be meaningfully more effective than Google's existing model, given the widespread availability of tools to circumvent such blocks."
In compliance with Right to Be Forgotten requests, Google has been directing all of its delisting efforts toward version of its search engine that are local to Europe.
The Article 29 Working Party has been adopting a set of guidelines it believes Google should follow in order to comply with the ruling and it asserts that delisting should be "effective on all domain, including .com domains."
"In that sense, limiting delisting to EU domains on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains cannot be considered a sufficient means to satisfactorily guarantee the rights of data subjects according to the judgment," stated the guidelines (pdf).
