> Why should France be allowed to control what Google (an American company) does outside of France?
According to that logic, why would the US be allowed to control what BP (a British company) does in international waters, as it did with the Deepwater Horizon fiasco? Perhaps because what BP did there affected US soil and citizens?
> Why should its operations in France be subject to the laws of every other country Google operates in, and vice versa?
That is not a requisite for this discussion. Google aggregating and publishing information on French citizens is a French matter. If you need to frame it in legal terms, consider it an export control on personal data. Since the data owner is in France (according to EU law), the governing jurisdiction regarding that data is also French law. So if French law says that Google should no longer publish it, that applies to the local data as well as the exported copies.
> Perhaps because what BP did there affected US soil and citizens?
When a French user uses Google.com, it's they who are requesting the information. It's not as if Google is actively pushing search results from Google.com into France, like BP's oil pushed itself onto the US coast.
> Since the data owner is in France (according to EU law), the governing jurisdiction regarding that data is also French law.
Again, I have no legal experience with these sorts of issues, but from your argument it seems that the website owner ought to be the one who is responsible for publishing the data. Google search results are merely a reflection of that content, and that reflection is under US jurisdiction.
And if France has no way to force the website owner to take down their content, then why should Google then be responsible, just because it also has operations in France?
According to that logic, why would the US be allowed to control what BP (a British company) does in international waters, as it did with the Deepwater Horizon fiasco? Perhaps because what BP did there affected US soil and citizens?
> Why should its operations in France be subject to the laws of every other country Google operates in, and vice versa?
That is not a requisite for this discussion. Google aggregating and publishing information on French citizens is a French matter. If you need to frame it in legal terms, consider it an export control on personal data. Since the data owner is in France (according to EU law), the governing jurisdiction regarding that data is also French law. So if French law says that Google should no longer publish it, that applies to the local data as well as the exported copies.