Article // Google has to pay at least a fine of €34 million (currently about $43,231,000 USD) because it has been unable to comply with a Belgian court order to remove all links to French- and German-language Belgian news sources as of September 5, 2006. I learned this from Dutch media, since the Belgian media disappeared from my radar. Google was unable to find out which domain names where covered by the court order and so could not clean up its database. Google has now asked the publishers to help identify these domains, so it can comply with the court order. After Google asked for their help, the publishers agreed last Friday to halt the daily €1 million fine. Google and the Wallonian media are currently negotiating an agreement.
Apparently they are linking to a source who's not fond of traffic: http://www.zdnetasia.com/blog/msiaexplorer/0,39056813,61963710,00.htm I'd choose 34m over some traffic too though!
Depends on how much traffic it was I never understood why some people get upset when you link to them! G-Man
Some people get upset when others link to them...I have a client who has a real estate office....I designed her site and she is paying me money to get traffic to her website...she uses some service and knows when google finds a link for her...Then she calls me all upset because someone is linking to her site..........I hate the fact that I have to keep explaining to her that this is good because it will help your rankings and it gets your business name out there... i guess some people don't like traffic.
This is quite a bump but had to say it, it's not because of the fact that they link, it's because of the fact that the news sites lose income because of google news. They lose income from they're google ads because people don't surf from they're home page to the news item. It's quite common sense ;-). And there was a little copyright issue, like databaselaws.
It isn't about linking. The news papers don't like G to take the text of their articles and put it on G's news webpage without the authors/newspapers permission.
The Belgian news papers don't like Google to take the text of their articles and put it on G's news webpage without the authors/newspapers permission.