Adviser to EU court backs Google, says search engines shouldn't be forced to apply “right to be forgotten” beyond the bloc's borders
Recommendation largely backs Google, which appealed a French order to apply the EU right to searches globally
Context & Ripple Effects
This opinion closes a loop that opened when France rejected Google's appeal in 2015 and insisted the right to be forgotten apply worldwide, then escalated when a French court referred the question to the EU's top court in 2017. By last September the European Commission had already sided with Google against extraterritorial reach, so today's adviser recommendation lines the EU's executive and its court behind the same territorial limit.
The advice is non-binding, but it frames the final ruling: if the court follows it, a French delisting order stops at the EU's borders, and the fight over where European privacy law ends moves from enforcement to appeal.
First-order effects
- Google would not have to strip links from its non-EU domains in response to European removal requests, directly voiding the global application France demanded.
- France's data-protection authority sees its worldwide-enforcement theory stalled pending the court's binding decision, which typically follows such opinions.
Second-order effects
- Other EU regulators lose the template for exporting delisting orders, shifting compliance toward region-scoped removals and geolocation filtering rather than one global deletion standard.
- Rival search engines operating in Europe get the same territorial safe harbor, keeping the compliance burden uniform across the market instead of advantaging any single player.
Third-order effects
- A ruling along these lines would set structural precedent that EU data rules bind within the bloc's territory, not wherever a platform serves users — a check on the assumption that European regulation automatically goes global.
- Enforcement would fragment by geography, pushing disputes over removed content into questions of which domain and which user a regulator can actually reach.
The trend: Europe's flagship privacy rights are hitting a territorial ceiling, with courts drawing the line between what EU law commands inside the bloc and what it can demand of platforms worldwide.