A Clash Across Europe Over the Value of a Click

PARIS — Google got rich by selling a simple proposition: The links it provides to other Web sites are worth a lot of money, so much that millions of advertisers are willing to pay the company billions of dollars for them.

Now some European newspaper and magazine publishers, frustrated by their inability to make more of their own money from the Web, want to reverse the equation. Google, they say, should pay them for links, because they provide the material on which the Web giant is generating all that revenue.

In several of the biggest European countries, they are close to getting their way.

A bill working its way through the German Parliament would enable publishers to collect a fee from Google and other search engines and news “aggregators” when they display excerpts from news articles alongside links to newspaper and magazine Web sites.

This week, President François Hollande of France threatened Google with similar legislation unless it came up with a way to compensate news sites by the end of the year. Last week, publishers in Italy said they would also lobby for such a law.

But Google so far is standing its ground. Already facing possible sanctions from European antitrust and privacy regulators, Google says that having to pay for links could threaten its “very existence.”

And it warned that the demand for money could backfire. If Google had to pay up, it “would consequently be forced to stop indexing the French sites,” Google wrote in a “position paper” it sent to the French government. Because 30 percent to 40 percent of the traffic on French news sites comes from Google’s links, the company’s threat is not an idle one.

Google said such laws would undermine its commitment to an open Internet and the free flow of information. It would also invert the company’s main business model. A majority of the company’s $38 billion in annual revenue comes from the sale of “sponsored links,” which appear alongside free search results. Google also sells advertisements on behalf of outside partners, including news sites, and shares revenue with them.

European publishers say their existence is even more precarious, unless they can start to generate more money from their Web sites and other digital products, like mobile applications. While advertising revenue continues to rise at Google, it has flattened out or is even falling at many European online publications.

“We effectively feed the search engine and the algorithm, constantly giving them fresh content, content that you can rely on, because it’s checked and it’s accurate,” said Nathalie Collin, the head of the I.P.G., an organization of French newspaper and magazine publishers. “This is why they can sell advertising.”

Mr. Hollande appears to agree with them. In a meeting with Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, at the Élysée Palace this week, the president “expressed his desire that negotiations between Google and news publishers begin rapidly and conclude by the end of the year,” his office said in a statement.

Mr. Hollande “stressed that dialogue and negotiation between partners appeared to him to be the better option, but that if necessary, a law could be implemented on this question, following the example of Germany.”

In a statement, Google played down talk of an ultimatum, saying Mr. Schmidt had “been to France many times to meet government officials and discuss how the Internet can help create jobs as well as export French culture globally.”

The German proposal cited by Mr. Hollande would create a so-called ancillary copyright, protecting online news content and regulating secondary uses of it, including the snippets that search engines and aggregators like Google News display to detail links to other sites.

Business users, like Google, would have to pay royalties in order to display news publishers’ material, even short excerpts. A collecting society, like the agencies that gather royalties on behalf of musicians, would collect the payments and distribute the money owed to publishers.

Wii U Pre-orders Selling Out Across U.S.

Nintendo recently unveiled the launch dates and prices for its new Wii U system, and many retailers' pre-order stock is now fast disappearing. At the time of publishing, GameStop has sold out of Deluxe units, but still has Basic left to pre-order, Best Buy is sold out of both, as is Sears, while Toys R Us has a 'check back soon to pre-order' message. Walmart is still taking pre-orders for both.

Overwhelming demand? Limited stock? Both?

In Australia, EB Games and JB Hi-Fi are still taking pre-orders for both models, as is Game in the U.K.

While we can't read too much into pre-orders selling out in North America, it's going to be fascinating to see how the system sells at launch, and also how much stock Nintendo will be able to get into stores for what is - effectively - a global launch. Back in August there were rumours about manufacturing issues for the GamePad, while Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime recently told IGN the company will not be selling the GamePad separately in North America in order to get as much console stock into stores as possible.

On Web, a Fine Line on Free Speech Across the Globe

The White House was not so sure, and it asked Google to reconsider the determination, a request the company rebuffed.

Although the administration’s request was unusual, for Google, it represented the kind of delicate balancing act that Internet companies confront every day.

These companies, which include communications media like Facebook and Twitter, write their own edicts about what kind of expression is allowed, things as diverse as pointed political criticism, nudity and notions as murky as hate speech. And their employees work around the clock to check when users run afoul of their rules.

Google is not the only Internet company to grapple in recent days with questions involving the anti-Islamic video, which appeared on YouTube, which Google owns. Facebook on Friday confirmed that it had blocked links to the video in Pakistan, where it violates the country’s blasphemy law. A spokeswoman said Facebook had also removed a post that contained a threat to a United States ambassador, after receiving a report from the State Department; Facebook has declined to say in which country the ambassador worked.

“Because these speech platforms are so important, the decisions they take become jurisprudence,” said Andrew McLaughlin, who has worked for both Google and the White House. Most vexing among those decisions are ones that involve whether a form of expression is hate speech. Hate speech has no universally accepted definition, legal experts say. And countries, including democratic ones, have widely divergent legal approaches to regulating speech they consider to be offensive or inflammatory.

Europe bans neo-Nazi speech, for instance, but courts there have also banned material that offends the religious sensibilities of one group or another. Indian law frowns on speech that could threaten public order. Turkey can shut down a Web site that insults its founding president, Kemal Ataturk. Like the countries, the Internet companies have their own positions, which give them wide latitude on how to interpret expression in different countries.

Although Google says the anti-Islamic video, “Innocence of Muslims,” was not hate speech, it restricted access to the video in Libya and Egypt because of the extraordinarily delicate situation on the ground and out of respect for cultural norms.

Google has not yet explained why its cultural norms edict applied to only two countries and not others, where Muslim sensitivities have been demonstrably offended.

Free speech absolutists say all expression, no matter how despicable, should be allowed online. Others say Internet companies, like governments, should be flexible enough to exercise restraint under exceptional circumstances, especially when lives are at stake.

At any rate, as Mark L. Movsesian, a law professor at St. John’s University, pointed out, any effort to ban hateful or offensive speech worldwide would be virtually impossible, if not counterproductive.

“The regimes are so different, it’s very, very difficult to come up with one answer — unless you ban everything,” he said.

Google’s fine parsing led to a debate in the blogosphere about whether the video constituted hateful or offensive speech.

Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University, said Google was justified in restricting access to the video in certain places, if for no other reason than to stanch the violence.

“Maybe the hate speech/offensive speech distinction can be elided by the smart folks in Google’s foreign ministry,” Mr. Spiro wrote on the blog Opinio Juris. “If material is literally setting off global firestorms through its dissemination online, Google will strategically pull the plug.”

Every company, in order to do business globally, makes a point of obeying the laws of every country in which it operates. Google has already said that it took down links to the incendiary video in India and Indonesia, because it violates local statutes.

But even as a company sets its own rules, capriciously sometimes and without the due process that binds most countries, legal experts say they must be flexible to strike the right balance between democratic values and law.

“Companies are benevolent rulers trying to approximate the kinds of decisions they think would be respectful of free speech as a value and also human safety,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard.

Unlike Google, Twitter does not explicitly address hate speech, but it says in its rule book that “users are allowed to post content, including potentially inflammatory content, provided they do not violate the Twitter Terms of Service and Rules.” Those include a prohibition against “direct, specific threats of violence against others.”

That wide margin for speech sometimes lands Twitter in feuds with governments and lobbyists. Twitter was pressed this summer to take down several accounts the Indian government considered offensive. Company officials agreed to remove only those that blatantly impersonated others; impersonation violates company rules, unless the user makes it clear that it is satirical.

Facebook has some of the industry’s strictest rules. Terrorist organizations are not permitted on the social network, according to the company’s terms of service. In recent years, the company has repeatedly shut down fan pages set up by Hezbollah.

In a statement after the killings of United States Embassy employees in Libya, the company said, “Facebook’s policy prohibits content that threatens or organizes violence, or praises violent organizations.”

Facebook also explicitly prohibits what it calls “hate speech,” which it defines as attacking a person. In addition, it allows users to report content they find objectionable, which Facebook employees then vet. Facebook’s algorithms also pick up certain words that are then sent to human inspectors to review; the company declined to provide details on what kinds of words set off that kind of review.

Nudity is forbidden on Facebook, too. This year, that policy enmeshed the social network in a controversy over photographs of breast-feeding women. Facebook pages were set up by groups that objected to the company’s ban on pictures of exposed breasts, and “nurse-ins” were organized, calling on women to breast-feed outside Facebook offices worldwide.

The company said sharing breast-feeding photos was fine, but “photos that show a fully exposed breast where the child is not actively engaged in nursing do violate Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.”

Just this month, a New Yorker cartoon tripped over Facebook’s rules on exposed breasts. On its Facebook page, the magazine displayed a cartoon that contained the topless figures of a man and women. The illustration was removed for violating Facebook’s naked breast decree.

Facebook soon corrected itself. With “hundreds of thousands” of reported complaints each week, the company said, sometimes it makes a mistake.