Google is respecting the "right to be forgotten" in Europe, but at the same time it's defying a request from France's data protection regulator.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) reached a landmark ruling back in May 2014, instating a "right to be forgotten." More specifically, this referred to the option to "delist" something. Europeans have the right to ask search engines to remove, i.e. delist certain links from search results, when the searches related to that person's name.
Google complied with the CJEU ruling and started allowing people to submit removal requests within a few weeks. Shortly after, the company also started putting it into practice, delisting search results.
Within a year, Google received, evaluated and processed a whopping amount of requests - more than quarter of a million. Those requests asked for the delisting of an even more impressive number of individual web pages - more than one million. Simply submitting such a request, however, is not enough to have Google delist a page.
Each request has to meet Court-set criteria, which can deem certain content irrelevant, inadequate, no longer relevant, excessive, or not in the public interest. If a request meets the Court's criteria, Google proceeds to delist it from search results for that person's name. Delisted, the information will no longer appear in results any European versions of Google Search.
Not too long ago, however, Google received a formal notice from France's data regulator, the CNIL. That notice requested Google to delist links from all European versions of Google Search, as well as from all global versions. In other words, if a removal request met the criteria in France, Google would have to remove it from Google.fr, other European versions of Google Search, and all versions of Google Search in any country in the world.
Google now draws attention of the troubling nature of this matter, which risks having a severe impact on the worldwide web. The company makes a compelling argument to explain its stance.
European law may sustain and enforce the right to be forgotten, but this is not the law globally. Some content that is illegal in one country may be legal in another, and one region's laws are not applicable all across the world.
The approach CNIL proposes cannot serve as a standard for regulating the Internet, Google argues in a new post on its official blog for Europe. If the CNIL were to get its way, "the Internet would only be as free as the world's least free place," the company highlights.
Google further points out that one country should not have the authority to decide and control what content users in another country can find and access. The company further notes that such a measure wouldn't even be necessary, because as much as 97 percent of Internet users in France access a European version of Google's search engine, not Google.com or some other version.
With all of these in mind, Google is declining the CNIL's request and has asked the regulator to withdraw its Formal Notice.
