Google has filed a fresh appeal in the highest court in France against the country’s privacy watchdog. The move came out following the latter’s imposition of a fine on the search giant over the implementation of the new right to be forgotten ruling, which applies to web searches worldwide.
The 2015 order by the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) spells out new guidelines for companies such as Google to hide such information than an individual might deem fit.
However, while such searches were still available from domains outside of Europe, CNIL is now pushing Google to make the implementation global so that information ruled private will remain out of bounds from any of Google sites – from any region worldwide.
Google, on its part, is arguing that such a ruling runs the risk of undue exploitation from “less open and democratic” countries.
“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 looking after the legal aspects of its search engine. “Other countries could demand global removals based on their idea of what the law should be around the world.”
CNIL had fined Google 100,000 euros in March, which again can be considered just a trifle against the $74.54 billion revenue that Google’s parent company, Alphabet reported in 2015.
Google also said that it has entertained about 1.5 million such requests so far, which led to the removal of information from its search results in around 40 percent of the cases. Google further stated it is open to reviewing such right to be forgotten requests based on their validity.
Google further questioned the right of the French court to impose its ruling on another country and claimed that this could lead to a dangerous precedent where each country will try to impose its ruling on others, leading to complete chaos and information blackout.
“This order could lead to a global race to the bottom, harming access to information that is perfectly lawful to view in one’s own country,” Google stated.
