truly, my black heart bleeds.

business model ? change in the industry dynamic ?

What did companies do when they realised the VCR was dead ? Oh yeah that's right, they started making DVDs. It's not Google's fault that trinity mirror didn't see the threat of interweb based news delivery creeping up out of nowhere ... I mean the internet's only been massively publically popular for what 15 years now ?

I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

Copiepresse represents French and German-language Belgian newspapers.

Stop indexing and caching sites that complain about being indexed or cached.

With such a large chunk of the search market secured I doubt *Google* will be the ones to lose out. I use Google news and if a couple of sites dropped from their roster because they were being arsey about getting extra traffic from Google then I doubt I would mind... plenty more news sources out there who are glad of the extra traffic and resulting ad revenue.

This is the 'Wallon' or french speaking part... They ran their economy completely into the ground and are fishing for money wherever they can . All they do is complain and complain. The government is a complete joke ( it took 6 months after the last elections to form a government , and now, after 3 months of it existing , it's ready to implode. They can not agree on anything.

All they have to do is put a robots.txt file on the site and done. it will not get indexed.

I am ashamed to be from that country.

>"Eight Midlands local rags had to be shut recently when they were no longer viable for their owner Trinity Mirror, primarily because of the growth of the internet."

That's one hell of a typo for "primarily because they were a bunch of dull-as-dishwater crappy local freesheet rags"!

People don't want them because they're crap. Rather than just quietly go bankrupt, like the free market entrepreneurs they so vociferously pretend to be, they decide to demand government subsidy and special privileges so that they can be isolated from the economic realities of their situation, which is that if you're selling shit that nobody wants but there's nothing else available, you will be out of a job the instant anything even half worthwhile comes along.

Whenever anyone asks me what I think of some local freesheet, my stock answer is always "It makes my bum sore"...

This is as absurd as holding back the development of the electric car and renewable energy for the sake of the oil producers.

Oh... wait...

There, there. What about if we merge Wallonia with Luxembourg, then create a large European "Parc des Ardennes" out of it with wild, free-ranging hogs and bankers? The flemish part gets the economic hubs and the coastal tourist centers. Brussels becomes the European District of Columbia (it's already on the same level of the "run down" scale at least). Everyone's happy.

We would have to put down a few surplus politicians but I guess nobody would mind.

Google did that already. Copiepresse went to court to MAKE google put them on the search engine site (loss of visitors). Copiepresse have been told they can

a) use a robots.txt to stop spiders

b) use a HTTP tag to stop retention of pages

c) add a google-specific tag to their website to tell Google to stop caching

d) mail Google about pages they don't want cached

but Copiepresse didn't like ANY of these solutions. They wanted Google to sign to a copyright license to cache their stuff, pay for the license and not be able to decide NOT to agree (by telling the court that if Google didn't cache their site, they were interfering with Copiepresse's business and abusing their search engine monopoly).

Read up on the history of this, people. Groklaw still has quite a lot on it. Be considerate of their bandwidth.