By Sam Schechner
PARIS-- Google Inc. is appealing a French data-protection order
to expand Europe's right to be forgotten to its websites
world-wide, kicking off a legal tussle over the territorial scope
of a rule established last year by the European Union's top
court.
The Mountain View, Calif., company said Thursday it sent a
request to France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des
Libertés, or CNIL, asking it to rescind a May order -- disclosed
publicly in June -- that would force Google to apply Europe's right
to be forgotten to "all domain names" of the search engine,
including google.com, not just Google sites aimed at Europe, like
google.co.uk.
The French CNIL said Thursday that it will take up to two months
to consider Google's appeal before deciding whether to withdraw its
order, or open sanctions proceedings that could lead to a fine of
up to EUR150,000 against the online-search firm.
Established just over a year ago by the EU's Court of Justice,
the right to be forgotten gives European residents the ability to
demand that search engines remove links that appear in searches for
an individual's name. Google has so far removed more than 1 million
links under the ruling but has insisted on only doing so for its EU
websites.
Google argues -- along with some free speech advocates -- that
applying the right beyond Europe could open the door to more
authoritarian governments attempting to apply Internet-censorship
rules beyond their borders.
"We believe that no one country should have the authority to
control what content someone in a second country can access," Peter
Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, wrote in a statement
provided by a spokesman Thursday. "We respectfully disagree with
the CNIL's assertion of global authority on this issue."
The CNIL and some other European regulators have assailed the
company's strategy, arguing the ruling says nothing about applying
only to European domain names. They say Google's approach makes it
easy to find private information that individuals had wanted
removed by searching its non-European sites, undermining the ruling
in Europe.
The CNIL suggested Thursday that some of the arguments Google
made in its appeal may be inapplicable.
"We have noted Google's arguments, which are in part political.
The CNIL for its part has relied only on legal reasoning," a CNIL
spokeswoman said. "There is no effectiveness if the right is
applied only in Europe."
The CNIL had initially given Google 15 days to comply with the
order when it was issued in late May, but had later extended the
deadline to the end of July.
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com
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