European Union regulators want Google to extend the controversial “right to be forgotten” to searches worldwide, including those made on Google.com, according to The Wall Street Journal. The right to be forgotten was put into place following a court ruling earlier this year and requires Google to remove search results about people in Europe should a person deem those results to be irrelevant, outdated, or inaccurate. Google has begun removing links across European domains, but the EU now wants to see those removals extend to all of its domains so that the block can’t be circumvented.
Europe’s privacy regulators want the right to be forgotten to go global. In a new set of guidelines agreed Wednesday in Brussels, the body representing the EU’s 28 national privacy regulators said that search engines should apply the bloc’s new right to be forgotten to all of their websites—in particular .com websites like Google . com, which Google Inc. had excluded from the new rule. Representatives of the body also said that Google and other search engines should limit how they notify websites that their Web pages have been the subject of such removals, saying that there is “no legal basis” to make such notifications on a “routine” basis. The guidelines escalate a disagreement between regulators and the search giant over how to implement a May decision by Europe’s top court, which determined that individuals in Europe have an online “right to be forgotten” that applies to Internet search engines. That battle is only the latest Google is facing with European authorities: they had a hefty French bill for back taxes and a call from the EU parliament to “unbundle” its search business from other commercial businesses.