Rare Book Monthly
Articles - November - 2006 Issue
Google Loses A Skirmish In A Belgian Court
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It's hard to see why companies like Copiepresse would object to these snippets which drive customers to their site, except maybe they believe they can squeeze Google into paying them for the right to send customers their way. What store wouldn't love to force newspapers to pay them for the right to carry their advertisements, instead of the other way around?
However, there is another aspect to this case that makes their unhappiness a bit more understandable. This has to do with Google's "cache." Many newspapers will make their articles free to the public online for some specified period, such as 14 days. After that, if you want to read it, you need to search the archives, and they charge a fee for access to the archives. So, on the fifteenth day, if you go to that page, you get a message to pay up or you can't read the story. What Google's cache does is to take an earlier version of that page, save it, and make it available at a later date. So, on day 15, when you can only retrieve the article by paying for it on the newspaper's site, you can simply retrieve it for free from Google's cache. At this point, you are no longer retrieving just a snippet of the article from Google, you are pulling down the entire thing from a copy housed on Google's servers. This is a bit different, a problem created by the fact that the publisher once offered the article for free, but now charges to view it. Of course, the publisher could avoid the problem by using the robots.txt protocol from the start, preventing Google from ever indexing the site. However, this would also stop the flow of traffic coming to the site from Google, traffic for which they do not pay, but are unwilling to give up in return for keeping Google from displaying articles.
These aren't easy issues to resolve, and this case leads to even more difficult ones. Google has been something of a gentle giant, living by a "do no evil" creed. Nonetheless, they have amassed enormous power over what we see by virtue of their great success. Right now, it does not seem so bad to allow them to make the rules, but what if at some point they decide to start doing evil? What, if like Fox, they decided to present only one side of political opinions? Would alternative views effectively be suppressed? Google has agreed to limit content in China in response to that country's threats to block access to their site. Could a future Google, free to set all of the rules about what will be seen and not seen, do something similar in the world which still sees itself as free?
Then there are the issues of international borders. The Belgian order is of limited effectiveness when it only applies to the Belgian site. To be truly effective, it must apply everywhere. That leads to the question, should Americans be limited in what they see based on a Belgian's court's judgment? If so, should the content Belgians see be limited by the decision of a Chinese court? It seems to me, you have to either answer yes to both or no to both, and I certainly would not want to be prevented from reading news the Chinese government, or maybe even Kim Jong Il, decided I should not be permitted to read. As noted at the beginning of this article, the Belgian court has opened a large can of worms, and it will take a long time to get them all back in there.
