Is Google really not complying with the EU's "right to be forgotten" law?

One of the easiest ways to find out more information about someone is to Google their name and see what comes up; this is a relatively common thing that people do, and even potential employers usually use this tactic to find out more about prospective applicants.  Unfortunately for some, this can bring up all kinds of past information that may be irrelevant now, but because it may have gotten a lot of attention at one point Google still feeds it at the top of the search results.  Obviously, this is not really done with any malicious intent as it is just the result of Google's web crawling algorithm, but it can still be problematic for people who don't want certain things about themselves so readily available to anyone who wants to search for it.  The EU has a law specifically for this situation that grants all EU citizens "the right to be forgotten"; basically, you can have any result taken down upon request if it is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive" (which is determined on a case-by-case basis).

This applies to all search engines hosted in and that have data that is hosted within the EU jurisdiction, and France recently requested that Google comply with it and allow users to request results to be taken down.  This wasn't a problem for Google in terms of the European versions of its site; google.co.uk, google.fr, etc all comply with the law and take down the results.  The problem that arises is that users can still easily circumvent the law by using google.com, which is US-based.  France still believes that Google should apply this law to their US-based site, so that this won't be possible.  There really doesn't seem to be any legitimate legal reasoning behind this, however, because the law only applies within EU jurisdiction, and so this boils down to a discussion on censorship.  Google itself used this argument for justifying its appeal to the request to take the content down on google.com, and they aren't completely unjustified in saying so.  It is unfortunate that people can get around the law so easily, but Google is not at fault for this and they did comply for all Google sites within the EU; technically, those are the only sites that the EU has any say on, so Google has done what they needed to do.

Whether or not they should just allow this feature universally anyway, regardless of the law, is an interesting topic though.  I'm sure there are many people who would say that they have at least one search result that they would like to take down for personal reasons.  Of course, one could always argue that taking down these results would be censorship as it could allow people or companies to choose what information people get to see online; this would only really happen if it is not properly enforced on a case-by-case bases.  It may be hard to accurately judge some cases, however, so it might be easier to just keep the results up and not risk letting people take advantage of the system for malicious purposes.  Either way, it is something to consider in a world where it is becoming increasingly harder to keep certain information private.