It's not about the servers, it's about the users location.
If a judge in France can succesfully that no one in the US can no longer find results for XYZ on Google, I find this troubling.
If a judge in France can succesfully that no one in the US can no longer find results for XYZ on Google, I find this troubling.
I agree with them that worldwide banning is troubling, especially if there is open door for any country to ban anything from any other country.
Let's not forget that deleting something from Google doesn't delete it from human memory, the source website or mirrors it might have, and from other search engines. What gets on the internet tends to be resilient to deletion. Google can only do so much and they didn't write the content in the first place. They are just infrastructure.
Even if we assume that somehow all French data happened to be located on servers in France then complying with those requests would mean purging the data except it is obvious they are not doing that if a person from another country can access the data. So however you slice it google is either non-compliant or is purposefully misunderstanding what it means "to be forgotten" from their indices.
The Internet user outside of France has a right to read something critical of the Frenchman to decide whether to do business with him on that basis and has a right to find that information using a search engine.
You can prosecute the Internet user, of course. That's what happens in China, for instance.
You can try to detect VPNs and make it a crime to even try to create such a VPN. That's also what happens in authoritarian countries.
But is that the right way for France or other EU countries to go? No.
Surely you would agree that no matter what French law is, there is no way a French judge should be able to force, say, an American company to not display links to American websites (which happen to mention a French person) for American users?
(disclosure: I work for Google, but not on anything related to RTBF, and my views are my own)