EU charges Google

Post by **Leisher** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 9:06 am

Post by **GORDON** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 11:28 am

Suing American companies is going to be Europe's main source of income pretty soon.

Post by **TPRJones** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 11:32 am

If they push it too far they'll just be cut off. If Google is fined 6 Billion and that's less than the profit they get in the EU market, it would make good business sense just to block EU IP addresses and write off that market until the laws change.

Post by **Vince** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 2:14 pm

Heh... they couldn't pay off enough officials in Europe like they do here. Or the NSA free pass did them no good there. One or the other.

Post by **GORDON** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 2:19 pm

I think it was Spain that passed a law saying google couldn't display links from within websites (beyond the root) to appear in a search.... so google stopped doing business in Spain. Last I heard, Spain wasn't happy about that.

Or maybe I dreamed that.

Post by **Vince** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 2:27 pm

Nah, it was just their Google News. Law that makes news aggregators pay a link fee to the copyright owners of news stories.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 4:22 pm

Vince wrote:Nah, it was just their Google News. Law that makes news aggregators pay a link fee to the copyright owners of news stories.

And the "right" to be forgotten.

Post by **TPRJones** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 5:57 pm

Link fees denote a fundamental lack of understanding of how the internet works. If you don't want people direct linking your articles, you can make that happen in your tech by directing all incoming traffic to a landing page that explains that you don't allow links. It would be stupid, but it's less stupid than the idea of "link fees".

Post by **Vince** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 7:55 pm

Yeah, I didn't really understand why someone wouldn't want the traffic, but I think it's because their aggregator reprints the first paragraph or so of the story without requiring you to actually hit the link.

Post by **TPRJones** » Wed Apr 15, 2015 8:09 pm

Ah, well that's slightly different then.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Thu Apr 16, 2015 1:21 am

Vince wrote:Yeah, I didn't really understand why someone wouldn't want the traffic, but I think it's because their aggregator reprints the first paragraph or so of the story without requiring you to actually hit the link.

Their agg service also more than occasionally fucks up and puts a nonsequitar pic next to the author's by-line and first sentence repeated ten times.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Fri Jul 31, 2015 1:15 pm

Google to France: fuck yourselves, frogs.

Alhazad · Post by **Alhazad** » Fri Jul 31, 2015 3:28 pm

Google said Thursday it would not comply with a French privacy regulator’s order to enact the “right to be forgotten” across non-European versions of the site.
In Europe, Google must remove search listings about individuals if they can prove the links reveal out-of-date or inflammatory content about them, under a European Union court ruling from last year.

“This is a troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web,” [Google’s Peter Fleischer] wrote. “We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access.”

No, you believe that no one country should call you on your half-assed handling of user complaints.

Post by **Leisher** » Wed Jun 28, 2017 10:59 am

EU nails Google again.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Wed Jun 28, 2017 1:12 pm

I'd laugh if they cut off Europe for so much as a week.