France fines Google €100k after rejecting company’s ‘right to be forgotten’ compromise

The French data protection regulator CNIL has fined Google €100,000 ($112,000) after rejecting the company’s proposed compromise over the controversial ‘right to be forgotten‘ legislation.

The legislation gives individuals the right to have ‘outdated or irrelevant’ information about them removed from Google’s search results. Google at first offered to remove the results from Google’s local domains on a country-by-country basis, in this case google.fr, before saying that it would also remove them from google.com when a search was carried out from within France …

France said that wasn’t good enough, and threatened to fine Google if it didn’t remove the results globally. As I hoped would happen, the company refused to do so and the WSJ reports that the CNIL has now levied the fine.

A Google spokesman said the company would appeal the ruling, adding that “we disagree with the CNIL’s assertion that it has the authority to control the content that people can access outside France.”

The amount is obviously trivial in Google terms, so it will be interesting to see whether it ends here or, as is perhaps more likely, France attempts to apply further fines when Google continues to refuse to comply with the ruling.