http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21302168

What are Google getting out of this, cos that'll prove costly to shareholders long term

Well Google are too big and need to be cut down to size. Their dominance of search is not good for competition.

Maybe, but the various commissions etc do a decent job so far, and the competition's a bit crap in comparison. And anyway, that's got little to do with this successful extortion attempt

I'm at a loss as to why Google didn't call their bluff, unless it really is a bollocks to block that content from search . Even then surely Google could ask for complaints and deal with them like the rest of their business?

I suspect the real reason for the complaint is easy money. Google are no worse than other news aggregators. Though I rarely use Google for my news. I might use Google to search for a news story and go to the news site anyway. Then they would get their ads on my screen. If this is about lazy people who only read news aggregators anyway that is another matter. If this became a common problem for Google they could simply blacklist searching for any french site. That would create a new set of problems but one that France will have to address.

I think it's less about whether Google do it more or less than any other site and more that Google is the place the vast majority of people are going to look.

That is very true. Most people will start at Google but my first news source is RSS. I have many news feeds and even though I also have a google newsfeed it is secondary to the BBC and newspapers news feeds. So in my case Google news is low down and usually only picks up what I already know about.

I decided to look at Google news just to see what it is like. Each headline is identified as what news source it is coming from and only has a headline and a first line of the story. If you want more you have to go to the article. If they are concerned about ad revenue they need to make sure that people do not use ad blocks, so maybe having less obtrusive ads might help. There was an online ad for an anti virus solution that buzzed and made a racket. It meant that I turned off the speakers and eventually installed an ad blocker. So in the overall scheme of things have improved and now I have taken out glimmer blocker.