Google appears poised to win a showdown
in Europe over whether the so-called “right to be forgotten” requires censorship of results worldwide.
On Thursday Maciej Szpunar, an advisor to the highest court in the EU, sided with Google in the fight, arguing that the right to be forgotten should only be enforceable in Europe
-- not the entire world. The opinion is non-binding, but seen as
likely to be followed.
The controversial right to be forgotten was created in 2014, when EU judges ruled that Google (and other search engines) must remove links to embarrassing information
about Europeans at their request, after weighing their right to privacy against the public interest in the information. The right to be forgotten doesn't exist in the United States, where free speech principles protect the
right to publish accurate information.
Google interpreted the EU's ruling as requiring removal of links to material in search engines designed for European countries, like Google.fr, but not
from its worldwide search results, including the U.S. page Google.com.
In 2015, French regulators rejected Google's position and ordered the company to remove material from all of its results
pages.
Google then asked Europe's highest court to reject that view. The company argues that no one country should be able to censor the web internationally.
"In the end, the Internet
would only be as free as the world’s least free place," global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer wrote on the company's blog in 2015.
“No one country should be able to impose its rules
on the citizens of another country, especially when it comes to linking to lawful content," he wrote. "Adopting such a rule would encourage other countries, including less democratic regimes, to try
to impose their values on citizens in the rest of the world."
The company drew support from a host of rights groups, including the Center for Democracy & Technology, Electronic Frontier
Foundation and Human Rights Watch. They argued that authorities in one country shouldn't be able to decide what search results are available in other countries -- especially because material that's
illegal in one country is lawful in others.
The CDT called
attention to several examples -- including a request by Pakistan that Google take down videos that satirized politicians, and one by Thai authorities who asked Google to remove YouTube clips that
allegedly insulted the royal family.