Google's advisory council on the Right to be Forgotten suggests limiting it to Europe
Limit ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ to Europe, Panel Tells Google — LONDON — Europe's so-called right to be forgotten should apply only in Europe. — That was the recommendation published on Friday …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google convened this advisory council after European regulators began demanding that delisting orders travel beyond European domains, and the panel's answer — keep the right territorial — landed mid-fight. Months later, France's data authority denied Google's appeal and insisted the removals be applied globally, while Google moved to strip links from every domain when viewed from inside the EU.
The council's framing turned out to be the winning position: four years on, an adviser to the EU's highest court argued search engines shouldn't be forced to delist worldwide, and the court itself ruled that Google need not apply the right globally. This report is the earliest marker of the territoriality line Google ultimately held.
First-order effects
- Google gains independent backing for resisting global delisting orders, shifting its dispute with the French regulator from a company-versus-state fight to a question of what the law actually requires.
Second-order effects
- European data protection authorities must choose between accepting EU-only enforcement and escalating for a legal ruling on extraterritorial reach — a fight France picked by denying Google's appeal later that year.
Third-order effects
- The pattern, confirmed when the EU's top court rejected worldwide application in 2019, points toward national speech regulations staying territorially bounded rather than projected onto the global internet.
The trend: Content-removal law is settling into geographic compartments, with courts limiting national regulators' power over what search engines show outside their borders.