European Union regulators want Google to extend the controversial "right to be forgotten" to searches worldwide, including those made on Google.com, according to The Wall Street Journal. The right to be forgotten was put into place following a court ruling earlier this year and requires Google to remove search results about people in Europe should a person deem those results to be irrelevant, outdated, or inaccurate. Google has begun removing links across European domains, but the EU now wants to see those removals extend to all of its domains so that the block can't be circumvented.
It's unclear if Google will have to comply with the regulator's latest request, but it certainly won't want to. Google has been opposed to the ruling, which hides information and makes its search less useful. According to Bloomberg, Google.com receives fewer than 5 percent of the searches throughout Europe, so it isn't as though Google has left open a large loophole. In fact, Google.com forwards to the local Google website when visited throughout Europe, so visitors have to do some amount of work to actually perform an unfiltered Google.com search. Google will certainly want to avoid removing links as widely as it can, so this is likely to be the latest piece in the ongoing dispute around how the right to be forgotten should be implemented.