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. Google post a link the Chilling Effects with the court order. 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 reference, or pay 1 million dollar/day if it didn't comply. Net effect: they removed all link to the sites, from Google News, but also from Google 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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Google News Removes Belgian Newspaper
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