Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has won a major legal victory in the European Union (EU).
The search engine company has won a court battle against European regulators who wanted to impose a global "right to be forgotten." It is being called a landmark court ruling in the ongoing battle between privacy and freedom of speech.
The EU Court of Justice ruled that search engines should remove results on European versions of its websites but weren’t required to scrub links globally. Five years earlier the same tribunal forced the U.S. tech giant to remove European links to websites that contain out of date or false information that could unfairly harm a person’s reputation.
The ruling is binding and cannot be appealed.
Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, challenged an order by France’s privacy authority to extend the scope to all of its platforms across the world. In a related ruling on how far Google could cite the public interest to refuse to pull links from the Internet, judges said the search engine must weigh privacy concerns against users’ right to know in each individual case.
In court, Google had argued that such decisions to make search results disappear pushes the Internet into dangerous waters. The 2014 judgment already forces it to offer up different links on European searches than in other regions of the world. The search-engine giant and its supporters, including press freedom advocates, have warned that Internet freedom would be brushed aside if less democratic parts of the world embraced the same policy and won the right to remove search results globally.
In a separate ruling, the EU judges were unclear in their decision over deleting links to two stories involving a personal relationship with a public office holder, and an article mentioning the name of a Church of Scientology public relations manager. Internet users’ right to know may override a right to privacy in some circumstances, it said. The balance between these rights must be made in each individual case.
That ruling puts the onus on Google to consider "the nature and the seriousness of the offense in question" as well as "the time elapsed, the part played by that person in public life and his or her past conduct, the public’s interest at the time of the request" and the consequences of showing a link to the information.
The search engine should agree to remove links pointing to information on legal proceedings against someone and potentially to a conviction if it is judged no longer relevant to a person’s life, the judges said. Google should also consider how it orders search results to reflect the current legal position, they added.
Google’s status as the leading search engine in Europe has led to an EU declaration that it “dominates the European market.” The company is separately challenging billions of euros in antitrust fines at the same EU courts in Luxembourg.
