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PARIS—France's data-protection regulator on Monday rejected Google Inc.'s appeal of its order to expand Europe's "right to be forgotten" to Google's websites world-wide, setting up what is likely to be an extended legal battle.

France's Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Liberté s, or CNIL, said that Google must now adhere to a formal order in May directing it to apply Europe's right to be forgotten to "all domain names" of the search engine, including google.com—or face possible sanctions proceedings.

Established just over a year ago by the European Union's Court of Justice, the right to be forgotten gives European residents the ability to request that search engines remove links that appear in searches for their own name. Google has applied the ruling, but only removed results from European domain names, like google.fr, not google.com.

Google didn't immediately comment. In the past it has said it would fight any order on a matter of principle. In France, the data protection authority can issue initial fines of up to €150,000 ($165,000)—a relatively small penalty compared with Google's annual revenue of $66 billion. Any sanction can be appealed in a French court.

In its July appeal directly to the regulator, Google argued that applying the right beyond Europe could open the door to more authoritarian governments attempting to apply Internet censorship rules beyond their borders.

In its rejection Monday, the CNIL said that it wasn't seeking extraterritorial application of the law, but simply application of European law by companies doing business in Europe.

The CNIL and some other European regulators have said that Google's approach makes it easy to find private information that individuals have wanted to be removed by searching its non-European sites, undermining the ruling in Europe.

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

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 21, 2015 06:05 ET (10:05 GMT)

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