The French are getting excited over the threat from Google to stop linking to French media websites in protest against legislation that would force search engines to pay for content. I think this is a good thing: Google has the power and influence to stop laws that prevent reasonable sharing of links, and publications must understand that links are the heart that pump traffic to their sites.
But what about the UK? The law has allowed the NLA to force businesses that share links to newspapers to pay licence fees. So where is the protest from Google over here? Well it appears that because Google has negotiated an exemption, they’re quite happy to forget the protests. Google is a search engine, so they’re fine, but media monitoring companies – who have software engines that search for content, so are hardly that different – are not. Perhaps "Don’t be evil" got replaced with "I’m alright, Jack" in the UK.
