Google Defeat? French Victory?

[Renegade]

Well, if you know the Albino Black Sheep joke, this is pretty darn funny.

Here's the joke first:

http://www.albinobla...p.com/text/victories

Then the link:

http://www.albinobla...com/text/france.html

And now, the Google stuff:

http://www.bbc.co.uk.../technology-21302168

Google has agreed to create a 60m euro ($82m; £52m) fund to help French media organisations improve their internet operations.

It follows two months of negotiations after local news sites had demanded payment for the privilege of letting the search giant display their links.

The French government had threatened to tax the revenue Google made from posting ads alongside the results.

The US firm had retorted it might stop indexing French papers' articles.

In addition to the creating the Digital Publishing Innovation Fund, Google has agreed to give French media access to its advertising platforms at a reduced cost.

The compromise allows it to avoid paying an ongoing licensing fee.

If you read it carefully, I'm not sure that it's a French victory. We'll see. It could be very bad for Google and everyone else, or it could be a bad deal for France. We'll see.

Either way, I think I'll get a few laughs out of the deal~!

[SeraphimLabs]

This sets a really bad precident I think.

At the same time, it's going to do far more damage to larger sites that have millions of outgoing links on them than it will to smaller sites like what I usually deal with.

The internet is going to be dramatically reshaped if other interests adopt this concept.

[Renegade]

This is also an issue in Ireland... We'll see what happens there.

[TaoPhoenix]

I'll jump in for the "minimal settlement" dept. These "settlements" for basically "pocket change" of 60 million are dangerous, because they leave the legal issues alone and are basically "here's a piddly bunch of pocket change but we want to leave the legal framework open".

I saw that story about how it was all big news about a week ago and it was solved for ... wait for it ... "only 60 million"?! Really?!

THAT's modern business.

[IainB]

France for a long time seems to have had an increasingly collectivist/socialist political culture, with its attendant problems of operating in a relatively free world market.
Under EU regulations, France would probably have had some economic umbrella/shield, but this may be unable to protect it from the economically disruptive/destabilising effect of the Internet - especially as the French economy is subsiding along with the European market generally.
If this settlement just exemplifies the economic status quo, then it would probably be unsurprising.
A free handout from anyone would be welcome at any time. US$82 million doesn't sound too bad, for starters.