By Sam Schechner 

PARIS-- Google Inc. is appealing a French data-protection order to expand Europe's right to be forgotten to its websites world-wide, kicking off a legal tussle over the territorial scope of a rule established last year by the European Union's top court.

The Mountain View, Calif., company said Thursday it sent a request to France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, asking it to rescind a May order -- disclosed publicly in June -- that would force Google to apply Europe's right to be forgotten to "all domain names" of the search engine, including google.com, not just Google sites aimed at Europe, like google.co.uk.

The French CNIL said Thursday that it will take up to two months to consider Google's appeal before deciding whether to withdraw its order, or open sanctions proceedings that could lead to a fine of up to EUR150,000 against the online-search firm.

Established just over a year ago by the EU's Court of Justice, the right to be forgotten gives European residents the ability to demand that search engines remove links that appear in searches for an individual's name. Google has so far removed more than 1 million links under the ruling but has insisted on only doing so for its EU websites.

Google argues -- along with some free speech advocates -- that applying the right beyond Europe could open the door to more authoritarian governments attempting to apply Internet-censorship rules beyond their borders.

"We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, wrote in a statement provided by a spokesman Thursday. "We respectfully disagree with the CNIL's assertion of global authority on this issue."

The CNIL and some other European regulators have assailed the company's strategy, arguing the ruling says nothing about applying only to European domain names. They say Google's approach makes it easy to find private information that individuals had wanted removed by searching its non-European sites, undermining the ruling in Europe.

The CNIL suggested Thursday that some of the arguments Google made in its appeal may be inapplicable.

"We have noted Google's arguments, which are in part political. The CNIL for its part has relied only on legal reasoning," a CNIL spokeswoman said. "There is no effectiveness if the right is applied only in Europe."

The CNIL had initially given Google 15 days to comply with the order when it was issued in late May, but had later extended the deadline to the end of July.

Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com

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