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Technology

Google for mediator to end France media row

Dunya News

Google says it is open to appointing a mediator to help end its row with French news media sites.

The battle has reached the highest levels of state here, with President Francois Hollande last month warning that his government would if necessary introduce a bill to force Internet search engines to pay for media content.Alexandra Laferriere, an executive in the firms French branch, said at a conference that the government had proposed nominating a mediator and that Google was open to anybody who can help dialogue between us and editors.Hollandes remarks in October came following a meeting with Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt.The firm has said it would exclude French media sites from its search results if France were to adopt the bill requiring search engines to pay to link to news websites.Italian and German firms have also joined the demand for Google to share some of the advertising revenue from user searches for news on websites.Google, which receives four billion hits worldwide every month, has said such a law would threaten (Googles) very existence.