Google helps fund French media

Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has been locked for months in a room with various representatives of the French media, thrashing out a licensing fee dispute.

The French, bless their cotton socks, maintained the do-no-evil behemouth pay them a fee for listing headlines and snippets of articles in its search engine results, according to a report in The Age Business Day. Google agreed to pay $80 million to help French media “develop their presense on the interent”, but did not agree to the licensing fee.

God-oogle made a similar deal with Belgian publishers in December last year, and is facing another case in Germany. Is this the beginning of a new business model for media?