Google threatens to cut links to French newspapers

GOOGLE has said it will not register French news websites in its search engine if a proposal to charge them for indexing stories is passed.

Newspaper groups have been lobbying the French parliament to force search engines to pay a fee for adding links to their search results pages.

Such a fee would impact heavily upon Google, who has said such a proposal is bad for the internet and website users.

Google outlined its opposition in a French language document, and said that it sends around four billion clicks a month to new sources in France.

But if Google faces having to pay a fee to link to newspaper stories then it says it would stop linking to them to bypass the charge.