Google Creates €60 Million, $82 Million Charity for French Newspapers

It seems that Google was able to diffuse the situation in France which threatened to have it pay news publishers for using links and small snippets of text in search results. For better or for worse, Google didn't take the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" approach and did negotiate with newspapers.

In the end, Google managed to stop newspapers from committing suicide, by getting removed from search results.

Google will set up an "innovation" fund to help explain to news publishers how the internet works, how you can make money from it and generally about life in the 21st century.

"Today I announced with President Hollande of France two new initiatives to help stimulate innovation and increase revenues for French publishers," Google's Eric Schmidt wrote.

"First, Google has agreed to create a €60 million [$82 million] Digital Publishing Innovation Fund to help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers. Second, Google will deepen our partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using our advertising technology," he said.

It seems that nobody saw anything wrong with the French president signing a deal between private parties.

News publishers rely on their trustworthiness, presumably in France also, but there doesn't seem to be much concerned over how they are perceived for now taking money both from the government and large international corporations.