A trend for global censorship could be started by the attempt by France to give an online privacy ruling global force is opening up a “disastrous can of worms” and could spur global censorship, said Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

French data protection authority had recently ordered Google to remove certain web search results globally and responding to that Google appealed last month against the order from the French authority.

People were allowed to ask the likes of Google or Microsoft’s Bing to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from web results brought up by searching for their name by  a  2014 ruling by the European Court of Justice.

Privacy campaigners have been pitted against defenders of free speech by the measure that is known as the “right to be forgotten”.

“One of the most disturbing things is the regulators in France have demanded that Google hide things globally, not just within the borders of France,” Wales told Reuters last week while talking on the sidelines of the Brilliant Minds conference in Stockholm.

“That’s just opening a disastrous can of worms, because then it becomes a ridiculous race to the bottom, where the Internet is censored by the most restrictive jurisdictions. And nobody thinks we should censor based on the whims of the Chinese government, for example. But that’s the path that people go down if they are not careful,” he said.

Arguing that to go further would set a dangerous precedent on the territorial reach of national laws, Google complied with France’s request but it scrubbed results only across its European websites and not all across the world as had been directed by the French authority.

Wikipedia was also working to adhere to the legislation, Wales said.

Allegations of censorship that were raised were countered by the French data protection authority which noted that the links in question, hidden when a person’s name is searched for directly, can still be found by searching in different ways and placing an additional argument that a person’s right to privacy should not depend on where an online search is made.

More and more time was being spent dealing with national regulations on the Internet by his staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales said. The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization that runs the online encyclopedia and the information is assembled and written by Internet users around the world.

“We’ve all become somehow kind of amateur lawyers on things like copyright,” he said.

(Adapted from Reuters)