Google threatens French media ban

flx89

flx89

The internet is my home
Jul 6, 2007
2,889
20
0
Europe
Google has threatened to exclude French media sites from search results if France goes ahead with plans to make search engines pay for content.

In a letter sent to several ministerial offices, Google said such a law "would threaten its very existence".

French newspaper publishers have been pushing for the law, saying it is unfair that Google receives advertising revenue from searches for news.

French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti also favours the idea.

She told a parliamentary commission it was "a tool that it seems important to me to develop".

Ad tax
Google France had said earlier that the plan "would be harmful to the internet, internet users and news websites that benefit from substantial traffic" that comes via Google's search engine.

It said it redirected four billion clicks to French media pages each month.

Print newspapers have seen their incomes gradually eroded in recent years as consumers and advertisers turn to the web.

Previously the French government has considered introducing a tax on online advertising revenues but it later dropped the plan, worried it would hurt small local companies more than global internet giants.

"France has a track record of enacting laws to protect its local media interest that seem out of step with the conventional wisdom in other markets," said Adrian Drury, an analyst with research firm Ovum.

"The question is whether by returning a search result Google is infringing the copyright of a site. The publishers will continue to contest this, but the general consensus is that it is not," he added.
Click to expand...

BBC News - Google threatens French media ban over proposed law
 


france is big market tho as many countries speak it, that would hurt google badly in possibly favor of some other engne that would eb o kwith paying per redirects aka cpc model. baidu.fr or yandex.fr coming soon
 
igl00 said:
france is big market tho as many countries speak it, that would hurt google badly in possibly favor of some other engne that would eb o kwith paying per redirects aka cpc model. baidu.fr or yandex.fr coming soon
Click to expand...

That doesn't mean the people are going to use those services. Obviously Google is dominate because they give results those other search engine can't. Otherwise, those other search engines would already be dominating Google in France, but they are not. So the silly French people might be angry about losing Google, and the government is going to have to stop being stupid... But it's France... so yeah... Their government is already wacky... So, Looks like Google will be exiting stage left.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom