Google has been told they must comply to new European data protection laws, or else face financial penalties, reports SFGate.

Europe’s top court ruled last year that people were allowed the ‘right-to-be-forgotten,’ and could upon request have details about themselves removed from the internet.

Google is refusing to comply to the French regulators, and it is now thought there will be a court battle, possibly lasting several years.

Other search engines are also required to adhere to these new regulations.

Image Credit: Carlos Luna (Flickr)

Google is the world’s most popular search engine, and it holds an approximate 90 percent share in Europe.

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Google has agreed to remove links on its European domains, however does not want to do this globally.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel has criticized the French decision.

“If the (commission’s) proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom,” Fleischer wrote. “In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place.”

The French regulators said:

“We note that Google’s arguments are partly political […] Those of (the commission), in turn, were based strictly on legal reasoning.”

Europe’s right-to-be-forgotten ruling was made May 2014. Since then, more requests have come from France than any other country – over 60,000.

For more on this story, see here.

Internet security has also been news in China this week, with the government planting police officials in the offices of internet firms and websites. For more on this story, see here.