French Regulator Rejects Google Appeal on Scope of 'Right to Be Forgotten' -- Update

By Sam Schechner 

PARIS--France's data-protection regulator on Monday rejected Google Inc.'s appeal of its order to expand Europe's "right to be forgotten" to Google's websites world-wide, setting up what is likely to be an extended legal battle.

France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, said that Google must now adhere to a formal order in May directing it to apply Europe's right to be forgotten to "all domain names" of the search engine, including google.com--or face possible sanctions proceedings.

Established just over a year ago by the European Union's Court of Justice, the right to be forgotten gives European residents the ability to request that search engines remove links that appear in searches for their own name. Google has applied the ruling, but insisted on only removing results from European domain names, such as google.fr, not from google.com.

Google on Monday reiterated that it doesn't believe the French regulator has the authority to expand the scope of the rule. "As a matter of principle we respectfully disagree with the idea that one national data protection authority can assert global authority to control the content that people can access around the world," a spokesman said.

Both sides are fighting to set a precedent. The CNIL can only issue initial fines of up to EUR150,000 ($165,000)--a relatively small penalty compared with Google's annual revenue of about $66 billion. But any sanction can be appealed in French court, and possibly referred back to the European level to establish how broadly the new rule applies.

In its July appeal directly to the French regulator, Google argued that applying the right beyond Europe could open the door to more authoritarian governments attempting to apply Internet censorship rules beyond their borders.

In its rejection Monday, the CNIL said that it wasn't seeking extraterritorial application of the law, but simply application of European law by companies doing business in Europe.

The CNIL and some other European regulators have said that Google's approach makes it easy to find private information that individuals have wanted to be removed by searching its non-European sites, undermining the ruling's effectiveness in Europe.

Write to Sam Schechner at [e-mail]

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 21, 2015 07:15 ET (11:15 GMT)

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