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By Sam Schechner 

Alphabet Inc.'s Google on Thursday argued that France risks upsetting international law and emboldening totalitarian censors by trying to force the search firm to broaden its application of Europe's "right to be forgotten."

The broadside is part of an appeal the Mountain View, Calif., company filed Thursday before France's Conseil d'État, the country's highest administrative court. Google is seeking to overturn an order from France's privacy regulator that says the firm must apply the new right to all its websites world-wide, regardless of where they are accessed.

The regulator, France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, in March fined Google EUR100,000 for not following the order.

While the fine is a pittance compared with Alphabet's 2015 revenue of $74.54 billion, the appeal kicks off one of the first major legal battles over how to apply the right to be forgotten, first established in a 2014 ruling by the European Union's Court of Justice.

The case could determine how broadly the EU can apply its strict privacy laws--and who sets global standards for how to balance personal privacy with free expression.

"This isn't about just France. This is about a risk to the way the Internet is governed globally," said Dave Price, a Google lawyer who oversees legal issues involving its search engine. "Other countries could demand global removals based on their idea of what the law should be around the world."

As established in the 2014 court ruling, the right to be forgotten lets European residents ask search engines to remove links from searches for their own names. Google vets requests, weighing privacy rights against the public interest in having that information tied to the person's name.

Google has removed some 550,000 links from searches conducted on its European search engines or conducted in Europe. But it says that complying with the CNIL's order to apply the right to its sites outside Europe would encourage other countries that want to censor content--and would remove Google's leverage to resist those demands.

France's CNIL denies there is a territorial question, saying it wants only to fully apply European Union law to individuals in Europe. The CNIL adds that by not applying the new right to be forgotten to all of its websites, Google is denying them the application of a fundamental right guaranteed in EU treaties.

The CNIL also argues that the right to be forgotten doesn't amount to censorship because even when it is exercised, a link to the offending comment remains accessible on Google search. While the link is removed from searches for the requester's name, any other search that would turn up the same page will still do so.

Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 19, 2016 08:33 ET (12:33 GMT)

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