MSN Folds Before Fight With Belgian Newspapers

[jmiller]

MSN didn't want to get into the legal tangle with Belgian publishers Copiepress the way that Google did. Very soon after Google was forced to remove content from its News index and post the ruling on its Belgian homepage, MSN began negotiating to avoid a similar fight.

I get a couple of thoughts about this: Google doesn't really have desire to fight gov't entities, just to make public their apparent defiance before submitting...which of course is wild speculation on my part.

Second, Microsoft rarely fights gov'ts, or makes a show of it, but also makes a practice of waiting around to see how things work out for competitors before taking any action.

What do you think? I'm I off on this?

Article here.

[weslinda]

I think that Microsoft is sick of paying billions of dollars every few years to government entities for various issues.

I believe Google hasn't had that fight yet. They haven't had to spend that kind of money, so they feel they can still take that stand. It is really quite sad that most of these sites wouldn't want visitors from Google though, that's kind of interesting in my eyes.