María González Ordóñez joined Google in 2008 and, as legal director since 2014, heads and manages legal teams in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Israel and Sub-Saharan Africa. She gives the following overview of the work she and her team are involved in: ‘As legal counsel of a company at the forefront of innovation, we are constantly pushing the legal envelope to protect our products…

What differentiates my team is the broad and varied scope of work we handle, resulting from the many different products and services, and the fact that we are at the cutting edge of the current technological and social change’. Heading legal teams in such varied regions, González strives to ensure her team strikes the right balance between successfully launching innovative products and functionalities while also ensuring compliance with the law showing respect for local customs and sensitivities.

‘My team does not only have to understand and apply the existing law but understand the social, economic and political environment to foresee potential outcomes in the legal sphere’, she highlights. González herself was a key participant on Google’s recent landmark case before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) where the Court created the so-called “right to be forgotten”. Requiring search engines like Google to change the way they operate, she was directly involved in the developing of new policies and processes to comply with the decision. ‘Despite our commitment to compliance, we have continued to challenge those cases where we thought access to information should prevail over the “right to be forgotten” meaning we have had to take over 100 cases to courts in Spain, including the Supreme Court, in order to get guidance on how to conduct this balancing test between free speech and data protection’, she explains.

Since then the Spanish National Court (Audiencia Nacional) has rejected the lawfulness of the global delisting of search results in “right to be forgotten” cases declaring this type of removal to be contrary to basic principles of international public law. In another important project and as a result of a change in the Spanish law, González contributed to the necessary closing of Google News in Spain: ‘We decided to close the service in Spain even though we continue to work with Spanish publishers to help them increase their readership and revenues online. This was a very tough decision taking into account Google News is a service which many users love and which creates real value for publishers by driving traffic to their websites. However, our decision emphasised the flaws of this new law and helped prevent a spill over effect in other countries. Google’s experience in Spain is now contributing to the debate over the appropriateness of this right that is taking place in Brussels’.

Another of her major contributions to the organisation include two cases affecting the keyword advertising business, AdWords, obtaining favourable court precedents under both trademark and unfair competition law which has since been consolidated by the Supreme Court. González is also commended for her role in the launches of YouTube Kids in Spain and Actívate, an educational platform launched to offer free digital skills trainings to young Spaniards.