Google is in the midst of a legal standoff with a France data protection authority about how far abroad Europe's "right to be forgotten" policy extends.
The European Court of Justice ruled last year that, under the "right to be forgotten," its citizens have the right to ask Internet search engines to remove (or delist) embarrassing or debilitating content about them from European search queries.
Google complied and has since delisted millions of content pages from EU search engines after users requested the removal, and Google found they met the criteria of being "inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive, and not in the public interest."
While Google asserts this ruling only applies to EU-related domains, France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, said in a May order that it should apply globally. Google
publicly pushed back on this order Thursday and asked the CNIL to withdraw the Formal Notice.
If Google complies with the extension order by CNIL, that means the search engine would not only have to delist information from google.co.uk, but also from other country domains such as google.com (US), google.com.co.in (India), google.com.co.ca (Canada), and google.com.co.br (Brazil).
Delisting the content under the parameters of "the right to be forgotten" does not mean the information is taken down from the Internet, but that it's no longer readily available to the public through a simple search on an intermediary such as Google.
Google said in a Thursday blog post that one country should not have control over what information people in other countries have access to.
"There are innumerable examples around the world where content that is declared illegal under the laws of one country, would be deemed legal in others: Thailand criminalizes some speech that is critical of its King, Turkey criminalizes some speech that is critical of Ataturk, and Russia outlaws some speech that is deemed to be 'gay propaganda,'" Google said.
