Europe Wants Worldwide 'Right to Be Forgotten' From Google

A European Union panel wants to extend the bloc's recent "right to be forgotten" ruling to all of Google's search domains around the world.

The Continent's highest court earlier this year ruled that its residents could force Google to delete certain search results about them, a controversial ruling that so far has applied only to European website domains.

But an E.U. privacy panel on Wednesday issued new nonbinding guidelines that would require the search giant to honor content takedown requests not only on its European domains—such as google.fr—but also on non-European domains, which would presumably include Google.com.

"De-listing decisions must be implemented in such a way that they guarantee the effective and complete protection of data subjects' rights and that EU law cannot be circumvented," the panel said in a statement. "In that sense, limiting de-listing to EU domains on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains cannot be considered a sufficient means to satisfactorily guarantee the rights of data subjects according to the ruling. In practice, this means that in any case de-listing should also be effective on all relevant .com domains."

The guidelines, however, are murky. It is unclear if the panel is requesting that the expansion apply only to European citizens living abroad or to people everywhere. Regardless, Google is likely to strongly oppose the idea, and it is unclear how a global expansion would conflict with laws in other jurisdictions, including the U.S.

When asked for comment, a Google spokesman said the company had not yet reviewed the guidelines, but said,"We will study them carefully when they're published."

In May, Europe's equivalent of the Supreme Court ruled that Google must allow Europeans the right to request that links about themselves be scrubbed from search results, a decision that has widely been panned by free-speech advocates in the U.S. and around the globe. The court argued that European digital privacy laws, which are generally stricter than in the U.S., provided residents with the right to have private information expunged from a search query, even if the posting of that information is lawful.

Thousands of Europeans since then have leaped at the opportunity to delete embarrassing, outdated, or unsavory content about themselves. In October, Google reported it had received 145,000 requests to deleted nearly half a million pages from its search engine, although a majority of requests had been rejected; 41.8 percent of the requests actually resulted in a takedown.

The guidelines represent just the latest headache for Google stemming from Europe. On Thursday, the European Parliament will vote on whether to split Google's search business from its other operations, as part of an antitrust push. The move would also be nonbinding, but it would exert further pressure on the European Commission, which has a long-running investigation into Google's practices, to take a harder line.

Several U.S. lawmakers this week have come out in opposition to the plan to "unbundle" Google's businesses. Reps. Anna Eshoo, Jason Chaffetz, and 10 others warned in a letter to the E.U on Tuesday that the move would "stem cross-border data flows at the expense of millions of people across Europe." House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte piled on in aseparate letter that accused Europe's legislators of pushing antitrust enforcement that is "motivated by politics, rather than grounded in factual and legal principles." The U.S. Mission to the European Union also formally expressed "concern" with the plan.

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