French law should not apply to the NZ Internet

The Herald reports:

Google is pushing back against France’s data privacy authority after the watchdog ordered the search engine giant to extend the so-called right to be forgotten to its websites globally.

France’s data protection authority CNIL should withdraw an ultimatum threatening Google with fines unless it delists requested links across its network, the Mountain View, California-based company said in a blog post on Thursday.

“We respectfully disagree with the CNIL’s assertion of global authority on this issue,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, said in the post. The French regulator’s order from last month “is a troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the Web,” he said.

The French data protection authority is threatening the global nature of the Internet.

The European Court said that in Europe there is a right to be forgotten and required Google to remove links to old articles on people, if they qualified.

That was a bad enough ruling, but it applied to only google.de, google.co.uk etc etc.

The French regulator is demanding that it apply to google.co.nz and google.com etc. That means that French law would apply globally and what we can access and view in NZ would no longer be uncensored.

This is very very important stuff. Once you allow one country to demand their law applies to all other portions of the Internet, then you have the Internet governed by the most restrictive regimes.

If I was Google, I would tell CNIL that if they are going to try and assert global authority over the Internet, then Google will block all IP address in France from accessing any google service – hence they can no longer be fined by the French regulator. The massive backlash from French citizens against the regulator should see it pull its head in.