What Place Do Search Engines Have Between Personal Data Law and Freedom of Speech?

The question raised in the title of this article is the complex and long-debated one that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will have to answer, following an application made by the Spanish High Court.[1] As a preliminary matter, let us first state that for the purpose of this article “search engine” means those services which, on request, automatically index web pages with a program called a spider or robot and which display the results in the form of a list of links to the external websites that are found.

The case leading to this question is between Mr. X, a Spanish national, and Google. Mr. X noticed that when he typed his name into the Google search engine, two of the results redirected the user to pages of a newspaper that included details of the auctioning of a property seized due to a failure by Mr. X to pay social contributions. Mr. X brought a claim against the newspaper and Google before the Spanish Personal Data Protection Authority. The Authority dismissed Mr. X’s petition against the newspaper, stating that the publication was legal and benefited from the protection of the Spanish "right to information." However, the Authority granted his petition against Google and ordered Google to remove the links from its results page and to prevent any further indexing of this property seizure decision. This decision by the Spanish Authority, given on July 30, 2010, created the somewhat paradoxical outcome in which the disputed content remained online, whilst the search engine was ordered to deindex it. The situation amounts to one in which a book is included in a library but is withdrawn from the catalog.