Google Accuses EU of Pursuing Censorship With Data Lawsuit

European officials want the search engine to unpublish information on command

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."