Google has accused France of attempting to regulate the worldwide internet by demanding that the search giant remove links in search results in every country, reports The Telegraph.
The US technology giant has been ordered by the French data regulator, the CNIL, to apply the so-called “right to be forgotten” worldwide, rather than in just the European Union.
The right to be forgotten has seen hundreds of thousands of web pages about individuals’ pasts removed from Google’s search results in the EU, but the CNIL said in March it should apply to web browsers outside of the union, and ordered Google to pay a €100,000 (£75,000) fine.
On Thursday, Google said it had appealed the demand, and said one country should not be able to regulate the worldwide internet.
“For hundreds of years, it has been an accepted rule of law that one country should not have the right to impose its rules on the citizens of other countries. As a result, information that is illegal in one country can be perfectly legal in others,” the company's general counsel Kent Walker said.
“The CNIL's latest order, however, requires us to go even further, applying [its] interpretation of French law to every version of Google Search globally.”