The application of the digital "right to forget" will therefore remain confined to searches on only European versions of Google. The EU Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday, 24 September, that the search engine juggernaut was not obliged to dereference disputed content outside the EU Member States' zone. .
A decision that marks a judicial victory for the US giant against the National Commission on Computing and Freedom (Cnil) in France.
The CNIL inflicted in 2016 a fine of 100,000 euros on the company for failure to respect this "right to be forgotten". Google, which estimates it had dereferenced 2.9 million links to comply, had challenged this sanction before the Council of State, which had in turn seized the Court of Justice of the EU.
"At present, Union law does not require a search engine operator who agrees to a dereferencing request (...) to perform such a dereferencing on all versions of its search engine. research ", judged the Court.
"However, EU law requires a search engine operator to make such a dereferencing of versions of its search engine available in all Member States," she adds.
In an opinion delivered in January, the Advocate General of the European body had already found that the firm could limit the application of the "right to be forgotten" to research carried out in the European Union.
With AFP, Reuters