Google has lodged an appeal against a EUR 100,000 fine handed down by French data protection commission Cnil, which found that the search engine company failed to take down certain search results in other countries. Google is only prepared to block flagged content from its national extensions in European member states (google.fr, google.de, etc) but not from google.com. Cnil sees things differently. It claims that the ‘right to be forgotten’ has no borders, precisely because the internet has no borders.
In February Google agreed to start taking down search results on all of its sites worldwide if they could be seen in Europe. In fact the company only applied the decision to the European extensions, leading to Cnil’s verdict the following month. Google said it received 86,000 takedown requests from France, covering 258,300 web pages, between March 2015 and February 2016. It had over 386,000 request globally in the same period.
