Google’s appeal against the global enforcement of “right to be forgotten” removals has been rejected by the French data regulator. The Guardian explains that if Google fails to comply, fines could be levied against Google, who would then be able to appeal against the financial penalty.

The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) ordered the internet giant to remove search results appearing under a person’s name from all its websites under Europe’s so-called “right to be forgotten”, but the U.S. company refused in July and requested that the CNIL abandon its efforts.

“Once delisting is accepted by the search engine, it must be implemented on all extensions, in accordance with the judgment of the ECJ”, it said. There’s also a public interest exception so newspaper reporters, and ordinary citizens for that matter, won’t have to spend weeks combing paper archives for evidence of politicians’ past misdeeds.

CNIL also said that given how easy it would be for someone to find information via the other domains for Google’s search service, it was undermining the goal of the original law.

Established just over a year ago by the European Union’sCourt 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. Prior to that, most rulings limited themselves to the local top-level domain, but the court took the same view as CNIL that even in France users can search using the Google.com domain.

The agency known as CNIL denied that it was trying to apply French law on the “right to be forgotten” globally, as Google had accused the watchdog of doing.

Google refused to comply with that order, though, and so in May this year the French data protection body CNIL issued Google with a 15-day deadline to begin implementing the ruling.

Google has no further right to appeal the order at this stage under French law. But the spokesperson said that the company still disagreed “as a matter of principle” with the thought of a single country’s data regulator making a decision to restrict the content that people in other countries see in their search result.

In July, Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, called France’s request to clean up global results “troubling” and said it could risk “serious chilling effects on the web”.