The Reporters Committee and US media groups join the fight over ‘right to be forgotten’ rules

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Since a European high court ruled more than a year ago that people could compel search engines to remove links to content about them, the debate over the “right to be forgotten” has been cast as a battle between various notions of privacy and Silicon Valley. But recently, numerous US media organizations joined the debate, saying the way French regulators have interpreted that right will burden publishers and news consumers on this side of the Atlantic.

On Sept 14, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press urged French regulators to rescind an order that the US organization says is on a “collision course with the protections for free expression and the right to receive information around the globe, including in the United States under the First Amendment.” The Reporters Committee, along with 29 other US media organizations -- from the Associated Press to BuzzFeed to newspaper chains like Advance and Tribune and industry groups like the Newspaper Association of America -- sent a letter to France’s data-protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), objecting to one of its May 2015 orders. CNIL instructed Google that when it delists links from search results, upon request under the “right to be forgotten,” Google must delist the links from all of its domains worldwide -- even its primary domain, google.com.


The Reporters Committee and US media groups join the fight over ‘right to be forgotten’ rules