In a long-standing fight between Google and the French data regulator Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés, the French regulators ordered the company to apply right-to-be-forgotten omissions from the search engine's global domain in May. In response, Google filed an informal appeal against CNIL president Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin on grounds that the omissions stand against the general public's right to information.

In the most recent addition to the story, Falque-Pierrotin has rejected this appeal, re-emphasizing the uniform nature of the right-to-be-forgotten ruling across all extensions of the search engine.

"Contrary to what Google has stated, this decision does not show any willingness on the part of CNIL to apply French law extraterritorially," says Falque-Pierrotin in a statement. "It simply requests full observance of European legislation by non-European players offering their services in Europe."

The right to be forgotten ruling allows citizens of the European Union to request links related to their past be removed from search results, but Google suggests that this could be problematic in the archiving of accurate information. The European regulators argue that once a delisting has been accepted under the ruling, made by the European Court of Justice in May 2014, it must be applied across all extensions of the search engine and that not doing so allows the ruling to easily be circumvented. CNIL's statement argues "the right to delisting never leads to deletion of the information on the Internet; it merely prevents some results to be displayed following a search made on the sole basis of a person's name."

So what does this mean for Google, which doesn't have any way to appeal the order under French law?

The company must now comply and remove tens of thousands of delistings from its global domain and other non-European domains for specific name searches. If Google refuses to comply, CNIL could begin applying sanctions, along with a possible 300,000 euro or $336,135 USD daily fine against the company's French subsidiary.

"We've worked hard to implement the 'right to be forgotten' ruling thoughtfully and comprehensively in Europe, and we'll continue to do so," said a Google spokesman. "But as a matter of principle, we respectfully disagree with the idea that one national data protection authority can assert global authority to control the content that people can access around the world."

Via: The Guardian