The de-referencing required of search engine operators should be limited to the European Union as a whole, said Advocate General Maciej Szpunar in his Opinion delivered on Thursday 10 January (Case C-507/17).
In May 2015, the Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties - ‘the CNIL’) in France gave notice to Google to delete the list of results, displayed following a search based on the name of a natural person, of links leading to Internet pages. It asked it to apply this deletion to all domain name extensions in its search engine.
Google refused, simply removing the links in question from the results displayed only in response to searches made from domain names corresponding to the versions of its engine in the Member States of the European Union. The American giant challenged before the French courts the CNIL's decision to impose a fine of 100,000 euros for failing to comply with the French authority's request within the prescribed time limits.
The French Conseil d'Etat (Council of State) having referred the matter to the EU Court of Justice, Mr Szpunar agreed with Google. It states that the Directive (95/46) on the protection of personal data applicable in this case does not expressly address the question of the territoriality of de-referencing.
According to him, a differentiation is necessary according to the place from which the research is carried out. Thus, research carried out outside the EU should not be affected by the de-referencing of research results. Possible in some cases affecting the internal market, such as competition or trademark law, the extraterritorial effects of EU law are not possible in the case of the Internet, the Advocate General points out.
Indeed, continued Mr Szpunar, if a worldwide de-referencing were to be accepted, the EU authorities would not be able to balance it with other fundamental data protection and privacy rights and there would be a risk that third countries would prevent people in the EU from accessing information.
Mr Szpunar also stressed that, when a right to de-referencing within the EU is established, the operator of a search engine must do everything possible to ensure efficient and complete de-referencing in the EU. The 'geo-blocking' technique may be used from an IP address located in a Member State and regardless of the domain name used by the Internet user conducting the search. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)