French data protection regulators reject Google's right-to-be-forgotten appeal

Calculators out as CNIL starts to tot-up the fines it plans to levy against Google

French data protection regulators have rejected Google's request to drop a right-to-be-forgotten case. The regulator, CNIL, has claimed that the internet giant is compelled to apply the new rule globally, not just to its search engines intended for audiences in the European Union. It opened a case against Google in July.

Google had argued in its appeal that neither CNIL nor the European Court of Justice, which introduced the right-to-be-forgotten, had a right to demand its application outside of EU borders. CNIL, however, has argued that all search results relating to an EU citizen should be de-linked from Google's search engine if the company agrees to such a request.

CNIL will now push ahead with a proposal to fine Google if it does not comply with the French regulator's demands. Those fines will start at €150,000 and could rise to €300,000.

"The President of the CNIL rejects Google's informal appeal against the formal notice requesting it to apply de-listing on all of the search engine's domain names," claimed CNIL in a statement.

CNIL is the first data protection regulator in the EU to open up a legal process against Google to punish it for not applying the right-to-be-forgotten globally.

However, it follows the December decision of the umbrella group of European data protection watchdogs to push for the EU's right-to-be-forgotten to be globally applied, arguing that it was the only way to ensure the "effective and complete protection of data subjects' rights and that EU law cannot be circumvented", according to Reuters.

Google continues to oppose the move. "As a matter of principle, we respectfully disagree with the idea that a single national Data Protection Authority should determine which webpages people in other countries can access via search engines," said a Google spokesman.

Back in July, when Google launched its appeal, its global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer described the French move as "chilling". He added: "While the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally," he wrote.

Some one million URLs have been delinked by Google under the right-to-be-forgotten law, but with many people complaining of a conflict between one person's "right to be forgotten" and other people's right to know - often forcing web users to use DuckDuckGo and other search engines outside of the EU to find the information they want.

There have also been legal cases, including one of a freshly released fraudster who wanted to have searches related to his crime de-linked not just by Google, but also erased by newspapers and websites that had reported on his crimes at the time.