Brazil has been the latest country to take a stance against Google and the way the search engine interrogates content produced there.
All 154 members of Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers, accounting for 90 per cent of circulation in the country, have pulled their content from Google News. The association’s president, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, said:
“By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites.”
The move in the Latin American country follows actions in France to pull its media content from the search engine. Many French newspapers are claiming that Google is unfairly receiving advertising revenues on the back of search results. There is also a similar move in Germany.
There is, however, some confusion as to how prudent the moves are. Search engines such as Google drive a great deal of traffic to news sites throughout the world.
Over four billion clicks to French media sites are generated through search results each month. Other companies can pay millions each year for such results using SEO.
The search engine also believes the action could threaten the way it does business. A letter issued by Google France in response to the possible law said the repercussions for the internet as a whole could also be extremely damaging.
Stating in the letter that
“it would threaten its very existence”
it seems there is still a great deal of work to strike a fair balance.
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