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RE: Italian regulators examine Google News

brian.smith@... 29th Aug 2009

There is a presumption amongst both the general public and internet service providers like Google that "if it's on the web, it's free".

This pricing model cannot be sustained. Google is clearly driving traffic to its own pages by simply reproducing content other companies and organisations have paid to have produced.

Nowhere is this truer than with content written by journalists paid for by their employers, the newspaper and magazine publishers.

Google are not an altruistic company; if there was no commercial advantage to them in repeating other companies' intellectual property - articles, news items etc - on their pages then they wouldn't do do. They would use the valuable and limited screen real estate for something else.

They - like the BBC and other parasitical websites - have no defence here. In a world where content is king I hope the authorities impose fines of a magnitutde that make it quite clear that one company cannot advance its commercial interests by stealing from another.