Europe is trying to force the search giant to apply the infamous “right to be forgotten” rule to results that show up at Google.com, which is outside Europe. Indeed, the European panel of data protection watchdogs released their guidance that Google removals should be conducted beyond local European domains in order to prevent circumvention of the “right to be forgotten” rule.

The guidance stated that removals must be carried out in such a way that they guarantee the complete protection of the complainants. If Google limits de-listing to European domains only, it would not be a sufficient way to satisfactorily guarantee the rights of data subjects.

As you know, the so-called “right to be forgotten” law allows European citizens to ask Google to remove search results containing outdated information about them. Since Google accounts for about a 90% market share of search in the region, it makes the engine the primary focus of all rulings and regulator attention.

The search giant complied with the EU ruling and started to process the applications from the users by requiring them to submit a special form. After approving the necessity of the de-listing, the search results may be removed from a local European domain. However, the company would not take down the results from it main google.com domain or other non-European domains.

After the Europe enforced its “right to be forgotten” law, Google received almost 175,000 requests for over 600,000 links. Thus far, the company has removed over 350,000 links or around 60% of the requested search results from across Europe. Google reminds that it can only delete the searches that include a person’s name, while searches for the same website not including the name will still show up in the search results. However, the new guidance from the European Commission claims that it is insufficient to satisfy the ruling, because in any case de-listing should also be effective on all relevant .com domains.

While the working European group consists of all the major data regulators, it is the responsibility of the data regulators in the individual countries to enforce those guidelines. In other words, each country will then use those guidelines as the basis for its own implementation of the judgment.