Google yesterday won a major case in the EU, when the bloc’s top court ruled that the US Internet giant does not have to extend the EU’s “right to be forgotten” rules to its search engines globally.
The European Court of Justice handed victory to Google in the case, seen as crucial in determining whether EU online regulation should apply beyond Europe’s borders.
The court said there “is no obligation under EU law for a search engine operator” to extend beyond the EU member states its 2014 ruling that people have the right to control what appears when their name is searched online.
However, it did stress that de-referencing on EU sites must include measures to “seriously discourage” a European Internet user being able to get around the “right to be forgotten” by accessing unrestricted results from a search engine on a non-EU domain.
That demands “geo-blocking,” which Google says it already uses effectively in Europe.
The case involving the company and France’s data privacy regulator, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL), highlights the need to balance data privacy and protection concerns against the public’s right to information. It also raises questions about how to enforce differing jurisdictions when it comes to the borderless Internet.
The court’s 2014 ruling forced Google to delete links to outdated or embarrassing personal information that popped up in searches within the 28-nation bloc. One year later, CNIL wanted Google to remove results on all its search engines on request, and not just European country sites such as www.google.fr.
Now, the EU court said that such application to territories outside the EU was not legal.
It said it was “not apparent” from the EU legal text “that it would have intended to impose on an operator, such as Google, a de-referencing obligation which also concerns the national versions of its search engine that do not correspond to the member states.”
Google hailed the decision.
“It’s good to see that the court agreed with our arguments,” its lawyer Peter Fleischer said in a statement.
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