The Brinkwire blog

Italian government investigates Google News

Posted on 28. Aug, 2009 by Andrew in Newspapers

Following on from complaints against Google News from the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers the Italian Competition Authority has begun to investigate.

The ICA searched Google’s Milan offices on Thursday morning. This led to a blog post from Google in their European Public Policy Blog in which Google points out they drive and take traffic from multiple sources and only show snippets of the stories. Once a user leaves Google News to read the full story it is up to the newspaper to how they profit from the free traffic, reminds Google.

The Italian newspapers are unhappy that they can’t opt-out of Google News without opting out of Google Web. The Preseident of the Federation, Carlo Malinconico, told the New York Times, “Publishers provide much of the content on the Internet, but they get nearly nothing for it. This is not fair, in our opinion. Our feeling is we lose more than we gain,”

So, what do you think? Are the Italians biting the hand that feeds them? Will they be able to make any more money if they get less traffic from Google?

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Tags: google news, italy