[ocdtrekkie]

Essentially France has now said refusing to list sites unless they grant the right to do it for free is illegal. Because the only reason Google has the power to demand free access is their monopoly.

They have demanded Google negotiate a fair price for the ability to display the news snippets.

[zajio1am]

> Because the only reason Google has the power to demand free access is their monopoly.

That is not really obvious

Consired situation where Google is not a monopoly and there is active market with search engines and each search engine needs to establish contract with each news site.

Now consider case where one search engine that already has contracts with half of all news sites is negotiating a contract with a news site that already has contracts with half search engines.

Who gains more from such contract? I would guess that the news site, becase such contract would directly lead to higher ad revenue, while for search engine it would lead to better search results that may or may not lead to higher ad revenue, but the effect would be most likely sublinear.

Therefore, marginal utility of contract is higher for news site and it is possible that in negotiation search engine could got payments from it.

[jstanley]

Given that the "fair price" is 0, that shouldn't make a lot of difference,

[wolco]

They should offer a revenue share for all ads on the newspaper pages. And force them to use adsense.

[droithomme]

I disagree. I think a fair price is below zero. The news sites should pay Google if they want their sites listed.