Google Braces for Landmark Global Privacy Ruling

Google is bracing for another landmark privacy decision at the European Union’s top court, five years after a “right-to-be-forgotten“ ruling forced it to delete links to personal information on request, according to Bloomberg.

The EU Court of Justice will rule on the U.S. giant’s follow-up fight with a French data-protection regulator over whether the right should apply globally and where to draw the line between privacy and freedom of speech. The Alphabet unit is challenging the French authority’s order to remove, on demand, links on all of its platforms across the world if they lead to websites that contain out of date or false information that could unfairly harm a person’s reputation. Judges may also clarify what links can stay online in the public interest.

For Google, the fate of the internet is at stake. The 2014 ruling already forces it to offer up different search results in Europe than the rest of the world. France’s CNIL says Google should purge those results globally. The company and its supporters, including press freedom groups, have warned that internet freedom would be brushed aside if less democratic parts of the world embraced the same policy. Since 2014, Google has had to weigh nearly 850,000 separate requests to remove links to some 3.3 million websites. Its staff have taken on a semi-regulatory role to strike a balance between what information should stay public and what should now be removed.

The EU court is hard to second-guess. The initial ruling shocked Google by rejecting its arguments that the search-engine was merely a neutral pathway for serving up information. The decision effectively left it to Google to decide if a link that someone asked to be deleted contained something that was “no longer relevant.“ The court now will have to spell out how widely Google should remove the links. Should it pull links viewed in one country or across Europe? Must it strip them from local sites such as France’s google.fr or also on the global google.com domain and what should it do if they’re accessed from France, Europe or elsewhere?

The EU court will also have to weigh whether Google can refuse to remove some information that might be in the public interest. It will advise French courts over a dispute on deleting links over a personal relationship with a public office holder and an article mentioning the name of a Church of Scientology public relations manager. Google’s importance as the leading search engine in Europe has led to an EU declaration that it dominates the European market. The company is separately challenging billions of euros in antitrust fines at the same EU courts in Luxembourg.