France Wants Google to Pay for Links to News Stories

President Francois Hollande told Google CEO Eric Schmidt that France would pass legislation to force Google o pay for displaying links to news articles unless it struck a deal with French media outlets providing those entities payment for linking, essentially. Google obviously doesn't agree with the policy. 

Press associations in France and other European countries want Google to pay when it displays links to newspapers in Internet search results. 

The tussle isn't new. Owners of copyrighted material, especially those losing revenue and relevance to online media, obviously would prefer to be paid by search engine application providers. That revenue would help offset revenue losses in other areas, including subscriber fees and advertising. 

Google, of course, prefers to argue it merely is indexing and "pointing users to" such sites. Owners of newspaper or magazine sites are free to put their content behind a "pay wall," of course. 

It is reminiscent of the imilar friction between Internet service providers and third party applications that are delivered over Internet service provider networks. In the end, it's all about the money. 

Google says they send four billion clicks per month to publishers and one billion of those clicks come from Google News. Google News is free, there are no ads on Google News, but yet Google has an AdSense program that paid out over $6.5 billion to U.S. publishers from in 2011. 

French news publishers obviously feel otherwise.