Google News Removes Belgian Newspaper

CaVi writes "Following a judicial action (link in French) by the 'French-speaking Belgian Association of the press,' Google.be has removed all the French-speaking press sites from its index, as can be seen by doing a search. The court order to Google is posted at Chilling Effects. In summary, the editors want a cut of the profit that Google News makes using their information. No such deal exists for the moment. Google has been ordered to remove all references, or pay one million Euros per day if it doesn't comply. Net effect: they removed all link to the sites, from Google News, but also from Google's search. Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN? Or will the newspapers, which gain from commercials, and thus net traffic, change their position when they'll see the drop in traffic that it is causing?" There's also a link to a Dutch news article on the subject; one of the key issues was evidently that some of what Google was carrying was no longer available on the newspaper's website itself, so rather then linking to the newspaper, Google was displaying it on their own.

Comments

Re:Abusing monopoly

[Andy Gardner]

Their have been ordered to remove other peoples news from their news service, and have decided to additional punish the source by also removing them from the search index.

Mod parent up, this is the important part. I'm suprised at the lack of concern directed at the monopoly Google is building. 'Don't be evil' is all very cute and amusing but we're talking about big business and when 'Don't be evil' begins to impinge on profits you can wave cute cudly Google goodbye. The role Google plays on the internet is hugely important and it's already so well established I think it's here to stay no matter what.

I noticed how people picked up on the fact that this news paper is cleary going to suffer from the punishment Google appears to be metering out. Strangly though the reaction is 'lolz that'll teach em!' instead of 'why is Google being evil?'. Perhaps this is due to the newspaper conveniently being located smack in the poiitical center of Europe, this makes it easy for the observer say to himself who do I dislike more Europe or Google?

Re:Don't worry its Belgium

[ZeroExistenZ]

1. Goerges Lemaître
2. Mercator
3. Peter Paul Rubens
4. Lernout & Hauspie
5. Joseph Plateau
6. Adolphe Sax
7. Vesalius
8. Ernest Solvay
9. Charles Van Depoele
10. Lambert Adolphe Quetelet

There are plenty more I'm not thinking about right now. Often in college studying ICT, there was the mention "did you know this was a Belgian invention?", but there's never stress on the names and well I don't remember right now. Belgians are more modest and less chauvenistic then Americans or other big nations, as well consider the US to have a much bigger population compared to Belgium. I'm quite proud of us Belgians, to make a mark on the map and produce so many fine scientists and engineers in such a small population. For the US to match that, there has to be a much smaller ratio in the population to achieve that.

$1m a day... nice sense of perspective.

Don't forget, it was a Belgian court ordering Microsofts' a fine of about $357 million but then you probably would've applauded it. Anti-Microsoft = houray. 1 newspaper (guess what, we have dozens of them) coming up for their copyrights against google = boooh dull country!

It's that cocky US chauvenistic attitude that makes the world not like you. Stay on your island, lardass.