Paris through Google Glass. (Source: Schezar/flickr)
Google has struggled to accommodate Europe’s intensifying call for protecting people on the internet — the controversial “right to be forgotten” law — while trying to maintain its own policies. But it looks as though the web giant is losing the battle in France, where regulators have slammed the company with a fine for not extending the data-scrubbing mandate to international websites.
France’s data protection watchdog fined Google $112,000 on Thursday for failing to comply with demands to extend the ruling across every regional domain. Meaning, France wants the scrubbing of results in France to be unsearchable and undiscoverable on all of Google’s sites, not just Google.fr. The country made this mandate last year, and Google has been arguing against it ever since, namely by challenging the theory behind it: What are the risks of forcing other countries to abide by one country’s rules? Does it limit people’s freedom of expression to restrict their search results in other countries based on one country’s mandate? Google’s point here is that if France is allowed to control what users around the world see, it sets a dangerous precedent for censorship on a global scale, especially considering how strict other countries’ censorship laws can be.
…The rest of this article lives on Blouin News. Read it here.
