French data regulator rejects Google’s right-to-be-forgotten appeal

Google’s appeal against the global enforcement of “right to be forgotten” removals has been rejected by the French data regulator.

The Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes ordered Google in May to apply RTBF removals not only to the company's European domains, such as google.ie or google.fr, but to google.com.

Google filed an informal appeal in July against the order to the commission’s president Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, claiming it would impede the public’s right to information, was a form of censorship and “risks serious chilling effects on the web”.

Ms Falque-Pierrotin rejected the appeal, saying once a delisting has been accepted under the RTBF ruling it must be applied across all extensions of the search engine and not doing so allows the ruling to be circumvented.

The rejection of the appeal means Google must comply with the order and remove hundreds of thousands of delistings from its google.com and other non-European domains for named searches. It has no further right to appeal the order at this stage under French law.– Guardian News and Media 2015