France is considering to bring in a legislation which would see search engine giant Google to pay for linking content from the French media, until it signs a deal with the country’s media channels.
According to reports, Press associations in France, and other European countries, are demanding Google to pay for the displayed links associated with French newspapers in Internet searches.
French President Francois Hollande said in a statement that he hoped negotiations between Google and press organs could begin quickly and conclude before the end of the year.
"If no deal were struck, France would press ahead with a law similar to one being drafted in Germany," Hollande said.
In addition, Google has countered the plan and endangered to ban French websites from its search results following the deployment of tax.
Italian and German companies are also demanding that Google should allocate some of the advertising income from user searches for news on their media websites.
During early October 2012, Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers halted use of search engine aggregator Google News and argued that it declined to pay for content and was diverting traffic away from the country’s newspaper websites.
Google was quoted by Bloomberg as saying that, "It’s not a secret that we think a law like the ones proposed in France and Germany would be very damaging to the Internet. We have said so publicly for three years."
