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France Threatens Google With Sanctions

By Elin Box on June 18, 2015

Global Marketing News – 18th June 2015

France threatens Google with sanctions

The data privacy watchdog in France, the CNIL, has ordered Google to remove links from all of its domains under the “EU right to be forgotten” law.

The “right to be forgotten” law means that EU citizens can ask Google to remove links to webpages containing incorrect or outdated information about them if these results appear when the person’s name is typed into the search engine.

Google has been complying with these requests, but has only been removing links concerning French individuals from its google.fr search results. The links still appear if you search for the person’s name using any other Google domain, including google.com.

The French data watchdog has ruled this practice to be unlawful and has given Google 15 days to remove inaccurate and outdated links from all of its Google domains. If Google fails to comply within this time limit, it will face “sanctions”, although it is unclear what these sanctions will be.

Google has not commented on the CNIL’s ruling or whether it will be complying with its requests.

The search giant has also been involved in similar legal proceedings in Canada this week, where it has just lost an appeal against a ruling stating that it must remove links pointing to a particular website from all of its domains.

In that case, the website in question was trying to sell trademarked products belonging to another company without their consent.

As with the EU case, Google had agreed to remove links to the website from its Canadian domain but was not willing to remove links from all its other domains. It now must do so, unless a final appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada is successful.

Unilever opens ecommerce store targeting China

Unilever has opened a store on JD Worldwide, the cross-border arm of JD – one of the leading ecommerce companies in China.

The store will mean that Unilever will be able to sell their health and beauty products to the lucrative Chinese market.

Unilever has said that they are pleased with the partnership with JD Worldwide, saying: “By partnering with JD Worldwide, we can quickly and efficiently address growing demand from Chinese consumers for many of our most successful products”.

Internet penetration rising in Vietnam

Internet penetration is rising rapidly in Vietnam, with the vast majority of this growth coming through rising smartphone ownership.

Internet penetration now stands at 44%, up significantly from just 12% 10 years ago. 75% of this internet traffic is coming through mobile devices, with one third of people in Vietnam now owning a smartphone.

Ecommerce has been rising hand-in-hand with internet penetration, with the Vietnamese ecommerce market now being worth an estimated 4 billion US dollars, up from 700 million US dollars just 2 years ago.

Social media uptake has also been following an upward trend. The number of active social media accounts has increased 41% in the last year alone, a rate of growth faster than in China, Brazil and India.

Facebook’s popularity is growing in particular, with 30 million people in Vietnam now being an active user of the social network, an increase of over 200% in just 3 years.

Alibaba to launch Netflix-like service in China

And finally, Alibaba has announced that it will be launching a paid subscription entertainment service similar to Netflix.

Alibaba’s service, which will be called Tmall Box Office, will be launched in 2 months time.

Users will need to subscribe to the service in order to access the vast majority of the content, with only 10% being expected to be available without subscription.

Alibaba is said to be considering both pay-per-view and monthly subscription options.

The Chinese online video market is worth an estimated 1.1 billion US dollars.

Tmall Box Office’s main rivals will be Youku Tudou, LeTVand Xiaomi’s upcoming video entertainment platform.

Webcertain’s global marketing news bulletins are daily 5-minute videos, providing marketers with the latest international digital marketing news in an easy-to-digest format.

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Elin Box

Content Marketing Manager at Webcertain
Elin is a Content Marketing Manager at Webcertain. She is responsible for Webcertain’s Self-learning platform, producing in-depth guides on a range of international digital marketing topics. She also helps run the Webcertain blog and is the writer of the Webcertain search and social report, an annual report summarising digital marketing best practices in over 50 countries. She is passionate about educating and empowering people to make the best decisions for their business and is proud to help share Webcertain’s wealth of digital marketing knowledge with the world. Elin is from the UK.

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