Adviser to EU court backs Google, says search engines shouldn't be forced to apply “right to be forgotten” beyond the bloc's borders
Sam Schechner / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
This opinion closes a three-year loop that started when France denied Google's appeal and insisted right-to-be-forgotten removals apply globally, prompting a French court to refer the question to the EU's top court in 2017 to decide whether Google must apply link removals worldwide.
The advisory opinion lands after the EU's executive arm already joined Google in opposing extraterritorial application of the rule before the same court — so both the Commission and now the court's own adviser have lined up against global enforcement, making the non-binding opinion a strong signal of where the final ruling will land.
First-order effects
- Google would remain free to honor EU delisting requests only on European versions of its search engine, escaping the operational burden of scrubbing results across every national domain.
- The French authorities who forced the referral see their push for worldwide removal rejected at the advisory stage, leaving them dependent on the full court overruling its own adviser.
Second-order effects
- European regulators seeking deletion would likely pivot to enforcement tools inside the bloc — pressuring search engines to geo-block EU users from removed links rather than demanding global takedowns.
- Other governments watching the case lose a template for exporting their own content rules through a single platform's global infrastructure, and may pursue local hosting or licensing requirements instead.
Third-order effects
- If the court follows its adviser, the precedent hardens a territorial model of internet regulation: each bloc enforces its speech and privacy rules within its borders while platforms operate a patchwork of regional versions rather than one globally compliant index.
- The gap between regional compliance and global reach becomes a structural cost center for large platforms, favoring incumbents like Google that can maintain per-jurisdiction policies over smaller search providers.
The trend: Courts are drawing territorial lines around digital-era rights enforcement, pushing the once-borderless web toward regionally fragmented compliance regimes.