Foreign Newspapers Say No To Google News

Newspapers in France and in Brazil are blocking Google News from aggregating their content, according to reports.

Brazil's National Association of Newspapers this week blocked Google News from aggregating any member paper's articles, according to SF Weekly.

The group's president told reporters that by denying Google the right to provide "the first few lines of our stories to Internet users," there's more likelihood that those users will click through to the entire article on the newspapers' Web sites, according to the newspaper.

French newspapers last week made a similar overture, when they demanded Google News pay them in order to link to their stories in someone's news aggregator. Google declined, the newspaper reported.

The newspapers took these actions despite admitting that they received a traffic bump from Google, SF Weekly reportd.

The publishers in question don't use paywalls, and instead rely on Internet users' clicking through to their main Web sites as a way to raise ad revenue. SF Weekly observed that without an original notice on Google News, it's less likely the article will be noticed at all.