It’s really funny how Europe — well, Francophones anyway — doesn’t understand the Internet. France has been whining about how Google and Facebook aren’t French and don’t pay for their infrastructure — so they should like totally tax the hell out of them. Similarly, they want to be able to censor any website at will and Sarkozy, who probably doesn’t have much time left in office, also made noises about going after gossip columns. And then there’s Belgium.
Belgium’s newspapers sued Google years ago over their stories appearing on Google News and in Google results, because web traffic is evil, apparently. Google took it to court and lost, and then, told that if they still featured content from Belgian newspapers they’d pay a fine of $4 million a freaking day, obviously went and yanked every last story they could find.
And now they’re whining that Google did what they wanted them to do in the first place.
So, help us get this straight, Belgian newspapers: You sued to be removed from Google completely, because even one line of text in a search result was an unforgivable breach of your rights under Belgian law. You won. Now you want Google to put you back on their search engine?
This is why the Uproxx staff just asks Cajun for news. We’re just saying.