Google says it received ~2.4M takedown requests from 2014-2017 under EU's right to be forgotten laws and complied with 43% of them
Google has now been complying with the European Union's controversial “right to be forgotten” laws, which the European Court of Justice first ruled applied to search engines in 2014, for three years.
Context & Ripple Effects
Three years after the European Court of Justice first made search engines responsible for delisting requests, Google is publishing the aggregate scorecard: roughly 2.4 million takedown requests since 2014, with fewer than half — 43% — granted. The company had already shown where the pressure concentrates, listing Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as the most-requested domains in its earlier transparency reporting.
The tally also lands mid-arc on scope: in 2016 Google extended delisting so removals apply across all Search domains for queries from the country where the request was filed (geographic expansion), a compromise that set up the still-unresolved question of whether removals should follow users worldwide.
First-order effects
- Requesters now have a benchmark — a 43% approval rate — that calibrates whether an individual delisting petition is likely to succeed, while Google's review teams absorb a volume of roughly hundreds of thousands of judgments per year.
- Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, already the top targets in Google's domain-level disclosures, remain the pages whose URLs are most frequently proposed for removal from European results.
Second-order effects
- Rival search engines operating in the EU must run comparable review-and-transparency machinery or face the asymmetry of being seen as less compliant stewards of the same court-mandated obligation.
- Publishers whose pages are delisted keep the content live but lose EU search traffic, pushing affected sites toward geo-aware distribution rather than deletion as the practical response.
Third-order effects
- The territorial-scope fight is the structural endpoint: the EU's top court later ruled that Google does not have to apply delisting globally (no worldwide removals), cementing a model where the same URL exists in EU results and everywhere else — a split internet by jurisdiction.
- If the pattern holds, search engines become standing quasi-judicial privacy arbiters whose approval rates and transparency reports are the de facto public record of how Europe's data-rights regime operates in practice.
The trend: Europe's data-rights stack is converting search engines into case-by-case delisting adjudicators, with compliance rates and territorial scope — not the principle itself — becoming the contested ground.