EU for “right to be forgotten” ruling to be applicable worldwide

The body representing the EU's 28 national privacy regulators said it wanted that its "right to be forgotten" ruling to be applicable worldwide, ANI reported.

A statement to this effect came during a press conference yesterday, according to CNET.

The EU had decided in May that people could request the search engine to remove their names from search results in Europe, in case of irrelevant or outdated search results (See: Users can demand to be 'forgotten' by Google, rules top EU court), a move opposed by the UK.

Google had received over 170,000 requests so far, asking far omission of webpages, including news articles.

The ruling however applied to the site's local versions in google.fr in France or google.de in Germany, but not to Google.com.

According to Google, it excluded google.com because whenever European users typed that into a browser, they were redirected to a local version of Google, to which the ruling applied.

The development represents the latest twist in a four-year antitrust investigation that had thus far not been able to reach a conclusion, BBC reported.

According to commentators, though the body had no power to break up the net giant, the vote sent out a clear message about whether politicians wanted regulators to take a tough line.

The proposal had been criticised by senior US politicians and a joint letter from two US government committees said that the way the EU was targeting US technology companies raised questions about its commitment to open markets (Regulators slam Google's handling of ''right to be forgotten'' requests).

"This and similar proposals build walls rather than bridges [and] do not appear to give full consideration to the negative effect such policies may have on the broader US-EU trade relationship," wrote senators Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch and congressmen Dave Camo and Sander Levin.

Further trade body Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) said that the "increased politicisation" of the Google competition investigation was "deeply troubling".

Guenther Oettinger, Europe's new commissioner for digital affairs, is said to be opposed to the move and was quoted by German business journalist Roland Tichy as saying there would be no break-up.

According to Google's chairman Eric Schmidt the ruling need not be extended to the US.