French regulator says Google must pay news sites to send them traffic
1–6 of 6 posts
Re: French regulator says Google must pay news sites to send them traffic
#2There is a side-question about this, are search engine even legal at all, by violating copyrights by publishing excerpts of websites (or full content like lyrics) in their search results without owner consent.
Re: French regulator says Google must pay news sites to send them traffic
#3The last time this policy was threatened (by Belgium?? IIRC) Google merely cut those websites completely out of the search results. In a matter of weeks those websites were seeing their internet traffic drop to practically nil.
Then it was "Google, please!"
Re: French regulator says Google must pay news sites to send them traffic
#4There is a side-question about this, are search engine even legal at all, by violating copyrights by publishing excerpts of websites (or full content like lyrics) in their search results without owner consent.
If they don't consent they can just block Google with their robots.txt.
Re: French regulator says Google must pay news sites to send them traffic
#5The last time this policy was threatened (by Belgium?? IIRC) Google merely cut those websites completely out of the search results. In a matter of weeks those websites were seeing their internet traffic drop to practically nil. Then it was "Google, please!"
Except in this case, the French order is also trying to force them to not alter the results:
"The regulator is also ordering Google not to alter the indexing, classification, or presentation of "protected content"—e.g. French news articles—in its search results."
My reading is that the French are trying to force Google to pay for linking to news articles, and prevent them from removing those links. That is, the French are well aware of what happened in Spain (it was Spain, not Belgium) and are trying to prevent that too.
This doesn't sit well with me. It seems that in the US, this comes really close, if not over the line of being compelled speech. The French are trying to force Google to display certain search results, and on top of that, pay for the privilege of being forced to do so.
Google is probably more invested in France than they are in Spain, so pulling out entirely is likely not in the cards, but it would send a heck of a message if suddenly no one in France was able to use any french Google services.
Re: French regulator says Google must pay news sites to send them traffic
#6It seems like Google disabled excerpts to news sites in France back in September 2019 leaving the search results only with the headlines/titles of news pages. What the French do there sounds incredibly unfair and I am certainly not a fan of Google.