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Google News Removes Belgian Newspaper

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lookit-all-them-words-not-there dept.

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.

4 of 381 comments (clear)

  1. Abusing monopoly by Carewolf · · Score: 0, Troll

    This is not entirely clear, but it seems Google is abusing their near monopoly on search to strong arm their position in a new market of News.

    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.

    I really thing Google should be allowed to link any news together in a news service, but escalating the issue to searching is really abusive and something I am quite sure they will be punished for in Europe. (Besides the obvious fact that it IS EVIL).

    1. Re:Abusing monopoly by Carewolf · · Score: 0, Troll

      Neither does Microsoft on operating system. Yet their market share is significant enough that they have to obey monopoly rules.

  2. Thats it. by TheUser0x58 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Serve me up some Freedom Waffles, Americans have had enough of those snooty Belgians!

    --
    -- listen to interesting music, support independent radio... WPRB
  3. Re:Block IPs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Let me guess, you are a socialist? I couldn't imagine a capitalist speaking in any such fashion.

    So let me get this right. What you are suggesting... is that companies that cannot manage to keep their information available.. and who cannot figure out how to use tags, they should be able to screw over another company that picks up the slack and keeps the articles around.

    On the other hand, you think that the company that does these things shouldn't have the right to do anything about it.

    Yes, you must be socialist.

    As to Microsoft, most people on /. don't loathe them because they fight strongly to succeed. Most loathe them because it makes them so cool and different... much like being goth, right? Nerds unite, for the common cause of Linux and to bring down those bastards at MS!