Right to be Forgotten - Google rejects 70% of 250,000 removal requests
On 13 May 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union made a historic judgement in favour of Spanish man Mario Costeja González who had claimed that an auction notice about his repossessed house in Catalonia dating …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Mario Costeja González's favour over that Catalan auction notice, Google is publishing its scorecard on the resulting delisting regime: roughly 250,000 requests processed, and about 70% turned down. The case established that individuals can ask search engines to unlink results about them, but this tally shows the court left the day-to-day judgement calls — what counts as inadequate, irrelevant or excessive — almost entirely to Google itself.
The rejection rate set up the fights that followed in this coverage: Google's own disclosure of which sites get targeted most (Facebook, YouTube and Twitter top the delisting request list), and France's data authority rejecting Google's appeal and insisting deletions should apply worldwide — a territorial claim Google resisted all the way up, until the EU's top court sided with it in 2019.
First-order effects
- Roughly seven in ten people who filed a removal request in the regime's first year got no delisting, leaving the underlying pages live in European search results.
- Google becomes the de facto arbiter of European reputation disputes, weighing privacy against public interest on a case-by-case basis without a binding standard from the court that created the right.
Second-order effects
- Social networks emerge as the most-requested targets for delisting — per Google's later domain breakdown — meaning the burden of the ruling lands partly on platforms whose content they never asked to be indexed.
- France's refusal of Google's appeal pushes the dispute beyond individual cases into jurisdiction: if deletions must apply globally, every national regulator's decision becomes exportable worldwide, which is precisely the expansion Google litigated against.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a split system of memory online: results scrubbed in Europe but intact elsewhere, an asymmetry the EU's top court ultimately ratified in 2019 when it held Google need not apply the right globally.
- Search engines, not courts or publishers, consolidate into the standing infrastructure for enforcing data-erasure rights — a role that predates and prefigures the broader data-rights obligations later written into EU law.
The trend: Europe's right to be forgotten is hardening into a two-tier internet where deletion stops at the border, with search engines as its enforcement layer.