Google's very public debate against the European Union over the right to be forgotten has only just begun.
Following an order from the Comission nationale de l'inforrmatique et des libertés (CNIL) of France that Google should extend the right to be forgotten to all its international websites and just the French version of the search engine, Google released a statement saying that it "respectfully disagree(s) with the CNIL's assertion of global authority on this issue" and asked the data protection regulator to withdraw its order.
But the CNIL does not appear to back off anytime soon, given that it has the full support of the European Court of Justice, which earlier announced that the decision to order Google to delink websites to uphold individuals' right to be forgotten extends to all of Google's websites, not just Google.fr, but also Google.com, which is considered Google's American website.
"This is a troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web," says Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel at Google. "While the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally. Moreover, there are innumerable examples around the world where content is declared illegal under the laws of one country."
Furthermore, Google says the CNIL's order is useless since an overwhelming majority of French Internet users, approximately 97 percent of them, use Google.fr as their search engine.
However, CNIL says its order for Google to extend the right to be forgotten is the result of hundreds of requests from individuals whose delinking requests were refused by Google. In its transparency report, Google said it received around 250,000 individual requests for approximately 1 million links over the first year since the European Court made its landmark ruling.
If Google refuses to comply within 15 days since it received the order, the CNIL says it will draft a report to the committee that oversees the implementation of French data protection law recommending the imposition of fines on Google. The CNIL has already succeeded on sanctioning Google in the past, after Google introduced a change in its privacy policy that the CNIL deemed was against French laws.
Free speech advocates and promoters of the right to privacy are divided on the matter. On the one hand, the former believe that the decision to impose delinking on all Google websites impinges upon people's access to information that they should, by American law, be able to freely access.
"France is asking Google to do something here in the U.S. that if the U.S. government asked for, it would be against the First Amendment," Jonathan L Zittrain, a professor of digital law at Harvard Law School tells the New York Times.
On the other hand, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says there are ways to protect privacy without stepping on the right to free speech. In fact, he says, Google already has a system for identifying personally identifiable information that can be removed under the right to be forgotten.
"A global implementation of the fundamental right to privacy on the Internet would be a spectacular achievement," Rotenberg says. "For users, it would be a fantastic development."
