Media

The French government threatens to force Google to pay a part of its advertising revenues to French media companies. Apparently Germany is considering the same. In response, Google announced it would be forced to drop French media from its search results.

"French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti told a parliamentary commission this week that she was in favour of the idea, calling it “a tool that it seems important to me to develop”.
She said she was surprised by the tone of Google’s letter.
“You don’t deal with a democratically-elected government with threats,” Filippetti told AFP on Thursday."

Spoken like a true thug. She and her government are the aggressors here, not Google. The government is issuing the threats. This is just flat out robbery. If a given media company can't negotiate a revenue sharing agreement with Google, it deny Google's aggregators access.

"Leading French newspaper publishers last month called on the government to adopt a law imposing a settlement in the long-running dispute with Google, forcing it and other search engines to share some of the advertising revenue from user searches for news contained on media websites."

This would be like horse and buggy companies using the government to steal money from those new-fangled automobile companies to subsidize them. These media companies forget the service Google provides them.

"It also noted that Google “redirects four billion ‘clicks’ per month towards the Internet pages” of French media."

It's not Google's fault the antique media companies can't make money from this.

"French lawmakers last year ultimately rejected plans for a tax on online advertising revenues, fearing the project would hurt small local companies more than global Internet giants like Google, Facebook or Twitter."

At least they got that decision right, but they still want to steal from Google. They're using privacy concerns to further threaten Google into compliance. More info. Google is prepared "to go nuclear on the issue."

"Google says that such a law would "threaten its very existence," according to a letter it sent to several French officials."

Google is right. If Google allows this in one country, then every country will do the same and Google will be destroyed in a Tragedy of the Commons situation as each country tries to grab more and more of its revenue compared to the others.

"Such rules "would be very damaging to the internet," Google said in its blog post."

But that's good for the government. It hates the internet. It's also good for the antique media companies. They hate the internet. Because there's so much resistance to outright regulation of the internet, this may be he way governments cripple it until they can control it.