Belgian court ruling on Google News both confusing and a dangerous precedent
Sunday, September 17th, 2006A court in Brussels has ordered on September 5th that Google remove all news stories from the French and German-language Belgian publishers*. “Removing” means: both from Google News, as well as from the Google cache of the regular search Google.be/.com search engine. The verdict is confusing because it mixes up aspects of the regular search engine and the news.google.be portal, both in its analysis and its ruling. And it is a dangerous precedent, because it assumes search engines should explicitly ask permission to to index and cache content.
