Number of reasons for the rejection were provided by the President of the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), France’s data protection authority that included the fact that European orders to de-list information from search results could be easily misled, if links were still available on Google’s other domains.
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CNIL rejects Google’s informal appeal against the formal notice requesting it to apply delisting on all of the search engine’s domain names. For example, if the request is made from France then google.fr. Europeans were able to switch to google.com and see the search results without any censoring.
An expert on Internet Regulation and Governance said Google cannot escape abiding by French law. According to the ruling, Google is required to comply with requests from European citizens about removal of their Web profile.
Google Inc. appealed this order in July, arguing that “while the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally” and that “there are innumerable examples around the world where content that is declared illegal under the laws of one country, would be deemed legal in others“.
Though CNIL’s decision specifically addresses Google, the ruling also applies to other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. Google has all the right to appeal any sanction in the French court and send it to a higher European level. Should the French regulator succeed, it is likely to have knock-on effects in the application of RTBF rulings. Google requires users to fill out a form with information regarding the specific URLs they wish to have removed from results, along with their country of residence.
Last May, CNIL informed Google that the right to be forgotten extended to all of its sites. The agency noted that people living in France and Europe can still access sites like Google.com, and thus those results needed to be scrubbed as well. It is either that Google acts in accordance with the French interpretation of the Right to Be Forgotten law or face financial penalties, or perhaps something more painful.
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“It simply requests full observance of European legislation by non European players offering their services in Europe”, it said in a statement. CNIL have now rejected Google’s request threatening fines of €150,000 ramping up to €300,000 for repeat offences. CNIL subsequently pressed charges against the company in June this year, which Google asked the regulator to drop. However, the company does not agree with the idea of a single national data protection authority.
