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Google News Removes Belgian Newspaper
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:15 AM
from the lookit-all-them-words-not-there dept.
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.
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So, ok, a search engine company decides it doesn't want to pay royalties and therefore doesn't index the provider's site. Now won't the provider actually lose readers since their articles won't be locatable by search anymore?"
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gambit3 writes "Google on Saturday published on its Belgian website a court order which forbids the Internet search engine to reproduce snippets of Belgian press on its news amalgamation service. The move constituted a u-turn as Google had said on Friday that it would not comply with the court order despite facing a fine of 500,000 euros ($640,900) daily if it did not publish the ruling." From the article: "Google said its service is lawful and drives traffic to newspaper sites because people need to click through to the original publisher to read the full story. It now displays stories from news agencies, foreign newspapers and Internet sites belonging to local television stations."
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Better than over inclusion of "News" Sites (Score:5, Insightful)
Block IPs? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Block IPs? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Block IPs? (Score:5, Insightful)
The newspaper's webmaster should just learn how to use the 'NOCACHE,NOARCHIVE' tag.
Bingo. If " 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." is accuarate, they failed to avail themselves of the quick, easy, and cheap solution. Obviously, that's not what it really was about.
I don't understand why news outlets get so upset when sites like google point people to their content. They should think of it as free advertising.
Parent
French? (Score:5, Funny)
What about robots.txt? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is Google Cache, I think (Score:5, Informative)
Belgium vs Google : some accurate info (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How important is French to the Belgians? (Score:5, Informative)
They speak Dutch (Flemish), French, and German.
I sometimes wonder about the average
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Re:How important is French to the Belgians? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you would look at the submitter's text, and the fact that the submitter's URL is .be, it might occur to you that the submitter isn't a native Engish speaker, and figure he made a simple mistake. In fact, you might even surmise that the submitter is Belgian, and would therefore not be likely to be confused about what languages are spoken in Belgium.
Even if you're going to be a pedant, in the sentence "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN?", 'Belgian' could just as easily be read as a mistaken use of the adjective form instead of the noun form, i.e. "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgium...".
And I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on basic logic and common decency.
-Esme
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Re:How important is French to the Belgians? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How important is French to the Belgians? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1604253
KFG
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Re:How important is French to the Belgians? (Score:5, Informative)
Belgium is a country with three official languages and three main regions - the Flemish-speaking Flanders (6 million people), the French-speaking Wallonia (3.3 million people) and the mostly-French-speaking, officially-bilingual capital Brussels (1 million people). Plus to add to the fun, there are 70,000 German-speakers in the east of the country.
There are some pretty harsh rivalries between the currently-financially-stable Flanders and the recession-hit Wallonia - it's impressive that the country hasn't split apart already. The situation is
But then Belgium's really dull and nothing happens here, right? I know otherwise, because I live here.
Parent
Re:Don't worry its Belgium (Score:5, Insightful)
ice country and all but not exactly news central. In effect this is like Des Moines doing the same, and not even people in Des Moines would mind if they just had OTHER peoples news.
Hmm, you have a very different perspective than I. I've always viewed Belgium as one of those countries with disproportionate influence. As the location for the NATO headquarters, they've always been sort of representative of Europe, and now with the headquarters of the EU there as well, it is semi-official. I've always viewed it as sort of a hub, where influential Europeans meet to make decisions. But, I've never been there, so maybe my perspective is skewed.
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Re:Don't worry its Belgium (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Abusing monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The last numbers I saw placed Google as having about 45% of the search market. That isn't even in the running for being a monopoly.
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.
As far as I can tell, there is no way in which this ruling applies to news.google.com that does not apply equally to google.com search. If one is ruled illegal by the courts, the other is probably just as illegal, so it makes sense to remove them from both.
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).
If Google had a monopoly, this could be an antitrust issue, but I've seen no evidence of that. There are a lot of players in the search market and Google has instituted absolutely no lock-in of any kind. Nothing stops Belgians from moving to something else, aside from the fact that the others tend to be lower quality. I don't foresee any antitrust action against them for this, nor any grounds for it. Since they don't wield monopoly influence in the market, I don't see how this is "evil."
Parent
RTF ruling (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Can we get some editing here please? (Score:5, Informative)
They changed the way the articles were accessible and made a "pay to view"-service, yet google had cached the newsarticles offering them "for free" (as the previously were offered publicly for free)
The problem for them was in how Google had a cache of something that wasn't free anymore, violating their copyright.
The link to the article on vrtnieuws [vrtnieuws.net] as a Belgian newssite is misleading as vrtnieuws is a Flemish (Dutch speaking) newssite. In the audio fragment the interviewer wonders wherever it's not "good publicity" to have google link to your content and the specialist agrees with that how newssites "like" that, but explains the articles didn't link back to the website to the updated or removed content which posed the problem: their content being cached, freely accessable when they charged for it, and no link back to their webpage.
Parent
Re:Can we get some editing here please? (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm. Another conspiracy by the evil cartographers [uidaho.edu]? Did you know that more than 99% of all maps are made by cartographers? Definitely some sort of conspiracy going on here.
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Why only google.be, not google.com/.fr? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like the block has no practical effect, since you can find everything by going to google.com or
I don't know why they did this for
Parent
Re:Ah, Belgium (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Ah, Belgium (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Ah, Belgium (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET! (Score:5, Interesting)
I always warn people I know who are vacationing in Europe -- avoid Belgium. Who knows what else they will try to persecute you for there.
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Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET! (Score:4, Funny)
Belgium is like Washington DC: too many bureaucrats for their own good.
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