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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

If he were to move to Europe, would Google remove the results for him, worldwide?

No, only from the European versions of Google. Google is actually sued by the French government because they feel that searches for French citizens should be censored based on the EU law on Google worldwide. Which to a certain extend makes sense because right now, if you see the red text mentioned in the article you can just visit the US version of the site to find the original results.

However, if it would be China, Russia or any other authoritarian regime demanding that Google would censor their international engine, I think the sentiment would be quite different.

This is the current behavior, but Google has received significant legal pushback from that stance. Canada's Supreme Court has also ruled that Google must remove results about their citizens globally.

Google, looking for a friendly court, decided to ask the Northern District of California for an injunction preventing them from complying with the order, and California, true to form, issued such an injunction.

Of course, the Northen District of California doesn't have jurisdiction over the Supreme Court of Canada, so by my read, Google is currently in violation of a court order in Canada. As far as I know though, Canada hasn't taken this any further yet.

http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/canada-supreme-court-google/

The Supreme Court had noted in their ruling that, if Google were to show that it is in fact illegal in their home jurisdiction to comply with the order, that would change the analysis. Courts are generally pretty willing to engage in comity analysis; they understand there's a problem when a Canadian court orders an American company to violate American law.

There's no law in the US that prevents Google from delisting a search result. Google essentially asked a US court to make something up so they could defy the order. I don't really feel that lies in the area of compliance with the order.

I think if it happened then Google or search engines in general would quickly splinter into regional alternatives that provide whatever is allowed in their jurisdiction.

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