Merely not linking their news sources is only partial cooperation. We should respect the spirit as well as the letterr of this ruling and also not link Belgian tourism and export industries.

Are the Belgian newspapers subsidized by the government? Do they not need readers?

Well, Belgium *is* insane. Heck, they outlaw major political parties too. Think of Belgium as Belarus with money and you get the picture.

I find it helps to think of Belgium more as a drive-through beer, mussels and french fries restaurant for the Wehrmacht when en route to Paris.

Well, newspapers (not just in Belgium but everywhere) consider web visitors who come in through the front page, navigate their way around the site to the place they want, read an article or two and then leave, to be much more valuable than those who appear via some kind of search engine, read an article, and then leave, as the first kind are exposed to more advertisements and are more likely to return than the second. Therefore they appear to believe that if they outlaw the second kind of visit, the same people will make the first kind of visit instead.

It's a reflection of their sense of self importance, I think, and the traditional high barriers to entry to their business, I think. The idea that people might just go somewhere else doesn't really occur to them. (We had this argument before. See references to "Deep linking" from about 1999. One would think they would eventually learn something).

What astounds me about this whole situation is the sheer bass ackwardness of the situation. There is a multi-million dollar industry out there devoted to one thing only: generating better results for your company in Google searches. That sort of speaks to just how important Google currently is in the information world; they're the new library of Alexandria, if you will.

To see an entity, any entity, actively going out of their way to discourage their content being linked by Google is just mind boggling.

That reminds me of a joke, Julian.

"Only three good things ever came out of Belgium: Front 242, Fabrique Nationale, and the German Army."

"The details of my life are quite inconsequential.... Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. "
- Dr. Evil

I would propose that this is all some scheme by Dr. Evil to establish a Google-Free beachhead in Belgium, in his global battle against the company whose mission statement reads, "do no evil".

Of course, if Google excludes all Evil-related websites, they would be in violation of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, here in the US, namely in excluding a class of persons based upon their creed (i.e. "Evil" being a creed) from Google's public accomodation (its website and search engine index)....

Is this another sly, Monty Python reference?

I know that when I see something in a newpaper or magazine online which is subscriptioon only or has been archived (eg revisit to look for it a few days later) and the archive is pay per view, I google to see if i can get it the google cached version...9 times out of 10 I can. This is because google is illegally copying. It is depriving the IP owner of revenue (maybe a couple of bucks per article?). Seperately, why should the IP owner have to "opt out" ---can a burglar rob my house and then say that I didnt specifically warn him off beforehand?

Thought you guys kinda were in favour of property rights...

andreww,

The value of the content is based on the ad revenue it generates. No eyeballs no ad revenue.

If the Belgians want to lower the value of their property I'm down with that.

The reason there is no opt out is that most rational folks would prefer to increase the value of their content.

M. Simon,

There is much room for disagreement about valuation methodology. My main point, however, is that the owner of property should be able to control its use (and name the price) - whether you agree the restrictions imposed by the owner are rational or not. I for one, do not want another (more powerful than I) to take my property and for me then to have to defend it... Would you be as comfortable with someone reproducing your book (say) in an anthology (or whatever) without asking for permission first? (Even though more eyeballs may see your name?) Can I take a painting from your house, without permission, and put it in an exhibition on the basis that it may increase the value of that painting? Is it not paternalistic for Google to argue that it can make the best decisions about increasing the vale of another's property? ...Whoops, perhaps I misunderstood the philosophical leanings of this site ;-)

Andrew, here is a different analogy. By blocking Google by law it is more akin to a restaurant preventing a food critic from publishing a review of their restaurant plus their address.

Ultimately the view of the Belgian newspapers will not matter... they are dinosaurs and the effects of the events of the internet extinction event just have not reached them yet, rather like a couple dinos chatting in Central Asia after the Big One hit and created the Gulf of Mexico..."Well Fred, that was sooooo last year, I don't know what all the fuss was about".

If people cannot easily find what they need from a given newspaper's on-line presence, they will find it elsewhere. What they will not do is change their searching patterns to accommodate the newspapers self-perceived interests.

Yes, what the Belgians have done reminds me of the early days of the automobile, where, when the horse drawn folks couldn't stop the tide, they built special "carriage roads" upon which the automobile was banned, and which consequently were of absolutely no use and were not used by anybody for anything of any value. The snobs who built the roads went bankrupt and sold the land to the government for national parks.

Mr Andreww also shows a serious lack of understanding of the media, one which perhaps the Belgians also failed to understand. Google has a cache; but so does every ISP. The most common one in use is called 'squid', and this program is vital to making the web work. If a page has any sort of popularity at all, chances are you are reading it not from the end users site, but from the cached pages that are topologically closest to you.

When you use a media you should either understand how it works and accept the plusses and minuses or else not use it. The Belgian papers chose to use the web, so they are stuck with the way the web works.

If they do not like then they can invent their own sets of protocols, design their own routers, build their own international fibre links, set up their own last-mile links, write and distribute their own server and browser software...

or they can just go get stuffed.