Wanting to force someone to advertise your product and charge him for it sounds so backwards, especially from a right-wing company. I'm happy this terrible excuse for a publisher couldn't get through with it. Will be interesting to see the Bild headlines about it, at the moment they are still busy rallying against unions (e.g. by printing the phone numbers of union leaders).
Since Google et al will always get exceptions from publishers, the Leistungsschutzrecht will primarily hurt small companies and start-ups through its newly embedded legal uncertainty.<p>Little business without a lobby in Germany..
I think the point here is being missed a bit. Yes they get a lot of benefit from traffic coming from Google. The point is they want that traffic coming directly to them.<p>If people go to Google News they see traffic from other alternative news sources as well. These people are Google News users and sometimes see e.g. Die Welt content, but Die Welt wants them to be Die Welt users. The publishers are used to having a direct relationship with their readers, they don't want to be competing with news clips and links from budget internet news sites and blog aggregators.<p>What's most interesting is that they have their own Facebook pages. So these guys are choosing to use Facebook for free to promote their brand, with pictures and excerpts from their articles. The thing there is that a relationship through Facebook can be more direct. The Facebook page is really an extension of the Die Welt web site, bringing it closer to Facebook users and trying to built that relationship. There's no way to do that through Google News.<p>Now, I do agree they're going about their relationship with Google in a bone headed and self-harming way. However they are doing it for what appear to them to be valid reasons. That's why papers and magazines always preferred direct subscriptions to sales on news stands. If they could have locked news stands into exclusive relationships, they would have.<p>So I think we can expect to see more initiatives like this from these publishers. Right now they're flailing around blindly and making fools of themselves, but they are not going to give up on their actual goals and eventually are likely to get smart about it. It'll be interesting to see what that looks like, but I doubt any effective initiatives they may come up with will be to the benefit of news consumers.
The best thing about their press release[0] is that within a couple of sentences they a) complain that they'd lose seven-digits in advertising a year per brand over the short listing on Google news and resulting decrease in traffic, b) demand that Google pays them for the Google news interaction.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.axelspringer.de/presse/Axel-Springer-schliesst-Datendokumentation-ab-Gravierender-Schaden-durch-verschlechterte-Suchanzeigen-bei-Google_22070688.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.axelspringer.de/presse/Axel-Springer-schliesst-Da...</a>