The French President, Francois Hollande, is in favour of a law that would seek to force Internet search engines like Google to pay a fee for displaying links to newspaper articles.

The French President and others have a good point: why should Google and other search engines enjoy advertising revenue generated from indexed searches such as news items, but not have to pay for indexing the original content.

Hollande was having a meeting with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt today about the matter, and told French regional press last week that he would back legislation for a search levy as soon as January.

Google, in return, threatened to stop indexing articles from the French press, which generates about four billion page impressions per year.

Fleur Pellerin, France’s minister of technology, said:

We don’t want to appear as a country that is anti-Google. Obviously Google is a wonderful tool and Google is a major actor of the digital ecosystem. What I would suggest — and what I’m going to suggest to Google and to the press — is to start negotiating, to start discussions for maybe three months, and try to find an agreement on a negotiated basis. And if they don’t, well we’ll see.

He continued that he hoped an agreement could be reached so that legislation wouldn’t be necessary.

[Sources: BGR, Reuters]