Google Appeals French 'Right to Be Forgotten' Order
May 19 2016 - 8:48AM
Dow Jones News
By Sam Schechner
Alphabet Inc.'s Google on Thursday argued that France risks
upsetting international law and emboldening totalitarian censors by
trying to force the search firm to broaden its application of
Europe's "right to be forgotten."
The broadside is part of an appeal the Mountain View, Calif.,
company filed Thursday before France's Conseil d'État, the
country's highest administrative court. Google is seeking to
overturn an order from France's privacy regulator that says the
firm must apply the new right to all its websites world-wide,
regardless of where they are accessed.
The regulator, France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique
et des Libertés, or CNIL, in March fined Google EUR100,000 for not
following the order.
While the fine is a pittance compared with Alphabet's 2015
revenue of $74.54 billion, the appeal kicks off one of the first
major legal battles over how to apply the right to be forgotten,
first established in a 2014 ruling by the European Union's Court of
Justice.
The case could determine how broadly the EU can apply its strict
privacy laws--and who sets global standards for how to balance
personal privacy with free expression.
"This isn't about just France. This is about a risk to the way
the Internet is governed globally," said Dave Price, a Google
lawyer who oversees legal issues involving its search engine.
"Other countries could demand global removals based on their idea
of what the law should be around the world."
As established in the 2014 court ruling, the right to be
forgotten lets European residents ask search engines to remove
links from searches for their own names. Google vets requests,
weighing privacy rights against the public interest in having that
information tied to the person's name.
Google has removed some 550,000 links from searches conducted on
its European search engines or conducted in Europe. But it says
that complying with the CNIL's order to apply the right to its
sites outside Europe would encourage other countries that want to
censor content--and would remove Google's leverage to resist those
demands.
France's CNIL denies there is a territorial question, saying it
wants only to fully apply European Union law to individuals in
Europe. The CNIL adds that by not applying the new right to be
forgotten to all of its websites, Google is denying them the
application of a fundamental right guaranteed in EU treaties.
The CNIL also argues that the right to be forgotten doesn't
amount to censorship because even when it is exercised, a link to
the offending comment remains accessible on Google search. While
the link is removed from searches for the requester's name, any
other search that would turn up the same page will still do so.
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 19, 2016 08:33 ET (12:33 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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