Google LLC – Court Ruling (Netherlands, 2020)

Claimants 1 and 2 are entrepreneurs who are or have been active in the real estate market. They are married. Claimant 1 still operates at least one company that does development and sales of new buildings. Claimant 2 used to run a house rental agency, but not anymore. When the names of claimant 1 and claimant 2 are entered in Google search, the search results show links to sites and TV shows featuring both claimants and their way of running business in the negative light. In July 2019, during the preliminary relief proceedings the producer of one of the shows was ordered by the Court to add a rectification notice because some statements in the show did not have enough factual support. The Court, however, did not agree with the claimants that the removal of the show was justified. Similarly, the Netherlands Press Council also partially agreed with the claimants, finding that the reporting published on one of the sites did contain unsubstantiated accusations, hurtful language and insufficient consideration of the claimants’ side of the story. However, the Council found that careless journalistic conduct did not take place. Claimants submitted several “right to be forgotten” requests to Google to have specific links removed from the search results. Google rejected those requests. Claimants brought two cases before the Court. According to claimant 1, 18 URLs must be forgotten in case 19-64 and 24 URLs in case 20-22. Claimant 2 is asking to de-list 21 URLs in case 20-22. The Court considers both cases jointly. Claimants are of the opinion that a data subject in principle has a right to have his or her personal data deleted from search engine. It is then up to the search engine provider to prove that there are valid reasons for not deleting the information. According to the claimants, the balance of interests is in their favor in this case as the links they would like to have de-listed contain a lot of inaccuracies. Moreover, the information published on those pages is incomplete, irrelevant and excessive. Google’s position is that the requests for erasure submitted by the claimants do not satisfy the conditions in Article 17(1)(c) and Article 21(1) of the GDPR and Google’s internal policy. The information the claimants would like to de-list has an important warning function and is part of an important public debate, in which claimants are public figures. Making this information unavailable would have a disproportionate effect that is not unjustified. Also, the previous decisions of the Court and the Press Council were not about the content published via the contested URLs. And finally, Google argues that the decisions to reject the de-listing request were in line with the Costeja judgement. The Court considered the following: • neither the preliminary proceeding judge nor the Press Council agree with the claimants that the contested pieces of information are to be fully rectified and that the claimants are largely in the right; • the reports published on the contested sites have a warning function and are part of an important public debate; • the deletion requests have not been sufficiently substantiated by the claimants; • the contested URLs contain information about the professional activities of the claimants, meaning that their private lives are less affected; • the fact that complainant 2 is no longer active in the rental business is irrelevant since nothing prevents claimants 2 from re-entering this market again; • claimants 1 and 2 have been involved in previous Court proceedings where their actions as landlords were called into question. They or their legal entities have been ruled against several times. The Court ruled that under these circumstances, the public interest of becoming informed outweighs the claimants’ interest of having the URLs de-listed. The “right to be forgotten” requests are to be rejected.