The Euro-antipathy toward Google reached some kind of apex earlier this month when a Belgian court ordered the search giant to remove Belgian publications’ content from its search index and Google News. The court further ordered Google to post its ruling on the home page of Google.be and Google News Belgium.
This decision came down following a complaint by a group called Copiepresse, which represents some Belgian newspapers. Copiepresse believes that Google’s indexing, and Google’s inclusion of its members’ articles in Google News, violates their copyrights and the court agreed.
The demand to be pulled from Google strikes most English-speaking people as, well, “nuts,” but there’s no denying the strong cultural animosity toward the dominant search engine in large parts of the world, particularly French-speaking nations. Google has remained relatively silent on the court’s decision…until now.
Google posted its limited (the case is ongoing) reaction to the order on its official blog this morning. European Director of Communications and Public Affairs Rachel Whetstone said that although Google couldn’t discuss legal matters,
Nevertheless we do feel that this case raises important and complex issues. It goes to the heart of how search engines work: showing snippets of text and linking users to the websites where the information resides is what makes them so useful. And after all, it’s not just users that benefit from these links but publishers do too — because we drive huge amounts of web traffic to their sites.
Of course, if publishers don’t want their websites to appear in search results (most do) the robots.txt standard (something that webmasters understand) enables them to prevent automatically the indexing of their content. It’s nearly universally accepted and honoured by all reputable search engines.
Google News is no different than Google web search in this regard: We only ever show the headlines and a bit of text. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper’s website. And if a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News we remove their content from our index –- all they have to do is ask.
So, Google already gives publishers the right to yank their content from both the search engine and news indices….why, then, is the group of Belgian newspapers so upset? It’s a mystery to so many people. Bully for the Belgian newspapers — they won, for now. They’re no longer in Google.
The question is: what did they win? Well, for starters, a whole lot less traffic. It’s not like Google will suddenly start paying copyright royalties to Belgian publishers. It’s more like Belgium as a publishing nation will silently slip into some kind of global obscurity and ultimately invisibility.
They have, however, achieved a vague moral victory over Google and let’s hope that makes them happy. Or, as John Murrell at Good Morning Silicon Valley said a little while back, “in whatever language, the four applicable words are: cut, nose, spite, face.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 10:02 AM|Comments(0)
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