Google Appeals French Order for Global ‘Right to Be Forgotten’

(Reuters) — Alphabet Inc’s Google appealed on Thursday an order from the French data protection authority to remove certain web search results globally in response to a European privacy ruling, escalating a fight on the extra-territorial reach of EU law.

In May 2014, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that people could ask search engines, such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing, to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from web results appearing under searches for people’s names – dubbed the “right to be forgotten”.

Google complied, but it only scrubbed results across its European websites such as Google.de in Germany and Google.fr in France, arguing that to do otherwise would set a dangerous precedent on the territorial reach of national laws.

In February it also started delisting results across all its domains – including Google.com – when accessed from the country where the request came from.

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