Google's dispute with France's privacy watchdog over a call to apply "right to be forgotten" rules globally to some Web links will be weighed by Europe's top court—three years after it told the ad giant to comply with an order to remove old, out of date, or irrelevant listings from its powerful search index, so long as they weren't found to be in the public interest.

French data regulator, the CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés), previously called on Google to globally delist certain search results, in a move that inflamed a row over the European Union's right to be forgotten landmark 2014 ruling. Last year, the multinational said it would appeal against CNIL's order, which included a €100,000 fine for failing to remove certain links from its global search results.

On Wednesday, it was confirmed that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will rule on whether certain links should be scrubbed from search engine results worldwide, across the EU, or on a country-by-country basis. It comes after France's supreme administrative court—the Conseil d’Etat—had asked the CJEU to intervene in the fracas between Google and CNIL.

It arguably means that judges at Europe's top court could overturn their previous ruling, having seen the effects of that decision play out in the wild. Notably, in a rare example of the CJEU disagreeing with an earlier non-binding advocate general opinion, the court ruled in May 2014 that Google and other search engines were obliged to remove certain links from their indexes.

At the time, the Luxembourg court cited the EU's 1995 Data Protection Directive in which it determined that Google could be considered the data "controller" because it scrapes websites to serve up search results that link to potentially sensitive content.

However, by the time the CJEU rules on this freshly opened right to be forgotten wound, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—which comes into force in May next year—could be in place. In its overview of the GDPR, the UK Information Commissioner's Office notes the following:

Under the DPA [Britain's Data Protection Act, which transposed the 1995 Directive into national law], the right to erasure is limited to processing that causes unwarranted and substantial damage or distress. Under the GDPR, this threshold is not present. However, if the processing does cause damage or distress, this is likely to make the case for erasure stronger.

While on the face of it, the fact that the right to be forgotten spat is set to swiftly return to the CJEU appears like a case of déjà vu, the judges will probably need to look at a shift in data protection law when weighing the dispute.

Alphabet-owned Google, though, isn't changing its tune. "Since 2014, we've worked hard to implement the 'right to be forgotten' ruling thoughtfully and comprehensively in Europe," said the company's global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer.

"For the last 18 months, we've been defending the idea that each country should be able to balance freedom of expression and privacy in the way that it chooses, not in the way that another country chooses. We're doing this because we want to ensure that people have access to content that is legal in their country. We look forward to making our case at the European Court of Justice."

To date, Google has rejected more than half of the requests to delist URLs from its search engine within the 28-member-state bloc on the grounds that they do not meet the criteria laid out by the CJEU.