I was thinking the same thing. I would point out though that IMO this goes deeper. Hollande would not support the press so much without an extra motivation: He is digging for taxes any way he can, and if Google pays the papers as he asks, he can tax _that_ income tu the max because the French press can not repatriate income like Google can. Therefore France taxes advertising income on the newspaper page views as well as the income on indexing the press is asking for.
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I was thinking the same thing. I would point out though that IMO this goes deeper. Hollande would not support the press so much without an extra motivation: He is digging for taxes any way he can, and if Google pays the papers as he asks, he can tax _that_ income tu the max because the French press can not repatriate income like Google can. Therefore France taxes advertising income on the newspaper page views as well as the income on indexing the press is asking for.