A Belgian court today ordered Google to remove all links to a number of Belgian newspapers from its Google News service and from its cache. Failure to do so would result in a fine of one million Euros a day. The newspaper publishers didn't like that Google uses their content for its own news offerings.
Google immediately complied and removed the links to the newspapers' sites -- but all of them, not only those on Google News. Users that now search for the big newspapers "Le Soir" or "La Libre" on the Belgian version of Google will find nothing. Absolutely nothing. Well, apart from a message saying that Google unfortunately had to remove all results to these sites.
Probably that wasn't really what these newspapers had in mind. Disappearing from a search engine that so many Internet surfers use as their starting point will not exactly boost their traffic (and ad revenues). Too bad. Maybe somebody should educate them about how the digital world works.
"Maybe somebody should educate them about how the digital world works."
Well, I guess that's easy: Google rules the digital world with an iron fist.
Class adjourned.
Posted by: Matthias | December 13, 2006 at 08:54 AM