Source: Google to expand right-to-be-forgotten link removal to all domains when viewed from EU, starting February
Google Will Further Block Some European Search Results — Google is about to change how people view its search results in Europe. — The American technology giant …
Context & Ripple Effects
Until now, Google's right-to-be-forgotten deletions applied only on its European Search domains; this report says that changes in February, so a link removed at an EU regulator's request disappears for EU users even when they search google.com. VentureBeat confirmed within weeks that the expansion would key off the EU country where the request was filed.
That design choice — enforcement following the searcher's location rather than the domain — immediately raised the stakes of the next fight: whether such removals should apply worldwide. France pushed that question to the EU's top court, turning a compliance tweak into a jurisdictional battle over how far European deletion orders reach.
First-order effects
- EU users will stop seeing delisted results on any Google domain, including .com, ending the workaround of switching domains to surface removed links.
- Publishers and individuals whose pages were delisted face a wider blackout: their content vanishes from EU searches regardless of which version of Google searchers use.
Second-order effects
- French authorities' demand that removals apply globally forces the issue to the EU's top court, making Google's geographic scope of compliance a litigated question rather than a company policy call.
- Other EU data-protection regulators can now calibrate delisting requests knowing enforcement follows the user, shifting the practical battleground from which domains Google edits to where its users sit.
Third-order effects
- When the EU's top court rules in 2019 that Google need not apply removals globally, it settles on searcher location as the compliance boundary — a territorial model of search regulation that resurfaces years later in the test removing EU publisher articles from Search and the DMA-driven Search tweaks across member states.
The trend: Search regulation is converging on enforcing rules by the user's geography rather than by domain, with courts arbitrating how far each jurisdiction's reach extends.