Google considers the French copyright proposal would have a damaging effect on the internet. The content creation explosion seen in the past years could suffer a lot from such laws.
Google threatens to kick French media websites out of its Google search results as a response for this newly proposed law. Google explains its position on French copyright proposals on its Google Policy Europe blog. In order to demonstrate that they will remain committed to collaborate with French Publishers associations Google has written to various French government offices explaining why this law would be detrimental to French users.
Google believes that such a strategy would threaten the existence of many French news publishers. Google search results often present results from French media sites. Every month 4 billion clicks end up sending Google users to french news sites. Google says it will not pay to list French media sites and it will rather choose not to reference all French media sites.
Aurelie Filippetti, the culture minister of France, commented on Google’s position: “You don’t deal with a democratically-elected government with threats”. She believes that it is very important to make Google pay for using news lead lines.
