This case refers to the geographical scope of delistings in "right to be forgotten" (droit au déréférencement) requests.
Google filed a complaint on the Conseil d'Etat against the decision of CNIL to fine the company in the amount of 100,000 Euros for failing to comply with the commission letter of formal notice. On the letter, CNIL demanded Google to delist search results on all the extensions of domain name of its search engine (google.fr; google.uk; etc...). CNIL considered the measures took by the company insufficient to ensure the data protection rights of European citizens.
In this decision, the Conseil d'Etat stayed the proceedings and referred three questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The first question is if a search engine, when implementing the ECJ's Google Spain decision, must delist the content from the results page from all its domains (.fr, .com, .uk, etc...), including those outside the European Union. In the case the answer to this question is negative, the Conseil d'Etat asks if the search engine should be obliged to delist the content from its European Union domains. Finally, the Conseil d'Etat asks if the search engine, when implementing a delisting request, should use a geo-blocking technology to prevent the results from showing up the results page of any user coming from the territory of the person requesting the delisting or, more generally, from any European Union territory, independently of the domain extension used to perform the search.