Civil Liberties

Google Accuses EU of Pursuing Censorship With Data Lawsuit

European officials want the search engine to unpublish information on command

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Google Inc. (GOOG) shouldn't have to remove content from its search engine that was lawfully published elsewhere, the company argued in a case at the European Union's top court that will set boundaries between freedom of expression and data-protection rights.

The operator of the world's largest search engine isn't a data "controller," it is "a mere intermediary in terms of the data which it indexes," Google lawyer Francisco Enrique Gonzalez-Diaz told a panel of 15 judges at the EU Court of Justice hearing today. Direct requests for personal information to be removed from a search engine—even if it was put online by a newspaper—would be "a fundamental shift of responsibility from the publisher to the search engine" and "would amount to censorship."