I will make a second comment, highlighting what I understand the core argument of the article to be. Each country should be allowed to decide on their own what tradeoffs they make when it comes to censoring information. (Right to be forgotten is censorship).
France should be free to enforce that right, and America should be free to reject such censorship. France should not have the power to force America to censor their citizens because France has decided that data infringes upon a person's rights. Substitute for any two or more countries you desire.
These two requirements : that France should enforce that right, and that america should not, cannot cohabitate in a space such as the internet : either the info is available somewhere and everyone can access it with minimum effort, or it isn't and no one can access it.
A very similar process is US' IRS asking foreign banks to disclose the activity of US citizen, and strong-arming foreign countries to enforce this on their banks. Does it look like the US is making a jurisdictional overreach ? Yes. Do they have another way to make sure their domestic law is applied ? No.
Maybe I'm confused but France couldn't make America do anything. The question is, can France tell a company "you can't operate here if you're going to do X in Y country" which it already can generally, just maybe it's a good idea/not a good idea in this case.
But then there is the problem that "operating here" generally means "you have a legal entity in our jurisdiction", the point being "we'll throw the executives of your legal entity in our country to jail if you don't comply".
However, that is a very different thing from French people being able to access some Internet service outside France. It's even a different thing from being able to restrict cash flow to an Internet service that you don't like, particularly in the context of EU which intends to ensure free movement of capital, goods and employees within the union.
The only way for France to enforce access restrictions would be to build a Great Firewall of France, similar to other more authoritarian countries, and do they want to wreck the EU to do it?
(Yes, France appears just a little bit authoritarian in my eyes.)
(Yes, France appears just a little bit authoritarian in my eyes.)
France has been in a continuous state of emergency for more than a year, and there is talk of extending it (I think this would be the fourth time) for another six months to cover the election period next year as well.
During such a state of emergency, the executive gains considerable extra powers, with provisions made for measures such as curfews, house arrests, the prohibition of public gatherings, censorship of the press, and searches and seizures without the usual judicial oversight.
So yes, I think it's reasonable to suggest that France is an authoritarian state at the moment.
However, IMO, on the scale of authoritarianism, France does not still score very high - it's not like Turkey, not to mention Russia or Arab countries. But its advocating the right to be forgotten is another worrying sign here.
As far as authoritarianism goes, hopefully no-one would seriously claim that France or, say, the UK or US, is a similar living environment in practice to somewhere like various Arab states or Russia. However, it is still worrying that so many legal principles and government powers are being set up in disturbingly similar ways in the West lately, even if the current administrations are only using those powers in a small number of cases. There's definitely an element of the general population who aren't in certain demographic groups assuming that "it will never happen to me" and so condoning official powers or behaviour towards other people that they would never accept if they thought there was a significant chance that they or their own loved ones would be on the receiving end. I don't believe that is healthy for important issues like civil rights and government accountability.
As for the right to be forgotten itself, I personally have no problem with the basic principle that the CJEU seems to have established in the original case, and as it's an EU wide issue, I'm not sure how France's advocacy is any sort of threat to any cross-border provisions that come along with the EU. I don't see why France can or should be able to compel people in other jurisdictions to follow the same rules, absent some proper agreement with the other jurisdiction that those same rules will apply there, though.
Unfortunately, the logical conclusion if everyone sticks to their positions would be that the EU really might start trying to block traffic to and from sites hosted elsewhere that don't respect the same principles when it comes to issues like privacy. If you think about it, it's actually quite remarkable that the Internet has remained as open as it has for so long, but that same openness has also created a kind of lawlessness online that increasingly has negative and sometimes serious consequences in the real world, and sooner or later something has to give. Personally, I hope it won't come to anything as dramatic as a Great Firewall of Europe or the like, but it's a fine line that a large, international organisation like Google is being asked to walk here.
France should be free to enforce that right, and America should be free to reject such censorship. France should not have the power to force America to censor their citizens because France has decided that data infringes upon a person's rights. Substitute for any two or more countries you desire.