If someone searches your name on Google and finds news of a criminal conviction that was later overturned, can the search engine be compelled to remove those results? The Punta Arenas Court of Appeals answered: no.
The ruling (Case No. 76-2026, March 18, 2026) confirms and consolidates the jurisprudential line exempting search engines from supervising the content they index, expressly relying on Article 85(P) of Law 17,336. The Supreme Court had cited that provision in 2018 (Case No. 28,480-2018), but without making it the centerpiece of the rejection. Punta Arenas uses it as the central foundation. For any company that receives deindexing requests, the message is the same: the search engine is not the correct target.
What happened
An individual acquitted in criminal proceedings filed a constitutional protection action (recurso de protección) against Google Chile Limitada. The request was to remove — or at least update — search results linking the individual to a criminal case resolved favorably by the Criminal Trial Court of Coyhaique on September 17, 2025. The argument: Google maintained an outdated and incomplete image, affecting honor, privacy, and psychological integrity.
The action was unanimously rejected by the First Chamber composed of Justices Caroline Turner González and Roxana Salgado Salamé, with the concurrence of Justice Claudio Jara Inostroza — who concurred only on the ground of untimeliness, without ruling on the merits.
What this could mean for your company
The Court built the rejection on two pillars.
The first is procedural: the action was filed outside the statutory deadline. But the second addresses the merits, and that is what matters for business. The court ruled that Google Chile committed no illegal or arbitrary act because "it merely administers a search engine that indexes content available on the web, without being attributable the creation, editing, or moderation" of that content. Liability, the Court said, falls on the media that published the information — Biobío Chile, El Ágora, Radio Santa María — which were not included in the action.
The legal basis is Article 85(P) of Law No. 17,336: search engines "shall not have the obligation to supervise the data they transmit, store, or reference." The court read this provision as a clear limit to the search-engine-as-filter theory: requiring Google to curate results would be equivalent to turning it into "a prior censor of information that third parties publish," a role the law does not assign.
What this means in practice: if your company operates platforms that index or aggregate third-party content, this ruling reinforces the position that the intermediary is not liable for the original content. But that protection has limits. The same Law 17,336 requires, to maintain the exemption, that the intermediary have no editorial control over the content and act with technical neutrality. A platform that actively moderates, edits, or prioritizes results operates in a gray zone.
There is another angle. Law 21,719 — Chile's new personal data protection law, effective since January 2026 — expressly enshrines the right of erasure and the right to processing limitation. Neither of these tools was invoked in this case; the petitioner opted for the constitutional route (recurso de protección) instead of the administrative or judicial avenue opened by the data protection law. The outcome could have been different with that approach. The Personal Data Protection Agency does not yet have published precedents on this point, but the legal framework exists and is operational.
What you can do
If you receive deindexing or content removal requests on platforms you manage, review first whether your company acts as a neutral intermediary (protected by Article 85(P), Law 17,336) or has some degree of editorial control that could remove you from that umbrella.
If you have received a request under Law 21,719 — erasure, processing limitation, objection to processing — and do not have a documented response protocol with a 20-business-day deadline, that is the urgent point.
If you are on the data subject's side — your name in search engines linked to archived, dismissed, or acquitted criminal cases — the constitutional protection route against the search engine now faces adverse jurisprudence from Punta Arenas. The more promising path is a direct action against the media that published the content, or a rights request under Law 21,719 to the data controller.
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice for any specific case. To analyze the impact of this ruling on your company, schedule a consultation with our team.