The EU Supreme Court is examining whether Google should comply with Europe's "right to be forgotten" policy on a global scale. The Supreme Administrative Court of France, the Council of State, referred the case to the European Court of Justice on Wednesday.
Google has collaborated with 2014 with European authorities to implement the policy when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Europeans can ask any search engine to remove some results that came back from the search for the name a person's.
However, initially, Google removed the results from its European websites, arguing that it would create a dangerous precedent for interfering in search results in countries that had different laws.
The French data protection authority, CNIL, later told Google that the deletion should remove the results from all domains, including those outside of Europe and from Google.com.
Google attempted to appease regulators in early 2016 when it began cleaning up its lists — across all domain of – when investigations began to be carried out by the country from which the erasure request originated.
However, the CNIL imposed a fine 100.000 euro on Google last year, urging the company to appeal to the Council of State. The issue now lies with the ECJ.
"From 2014, we have worked hard to implement the decision" said Peter Fleischer, Google's counselor for privacy.
"We stand for the idea that each country should be able to balance freedom of expression and privacy in the way it chooses, not the way another country chooses."
A similar case existed in Canada, where the Supreme Court ruled against Google: Last month, the Supreme Court of Canada confirmed ordered Google to remove a company's website at a global level.
While the EU case is pending, Google is reportedly taking other steps to comply with Europe's stricter privacy laws. Last week, when he opened the new platform Google Cloud Platform in London, the company reaffirmed its commitment to EU data protection requirements, including the "right to be forgotten".
