An interesting story has come out of Belgium in the past months.

A group of national newspapers has objected to Google scanning its stories to put onto the Google news service. The logic behind this is pretty obvious. They want people on their site reading the news - either paying via subscription and being subjected to advertisements. Of course if the same content can be viewed or referenced at another location, then it affects the effectiveness of the news sites.

They took the case to an international court in 2006 and recently... won.

In return, Google took the ruling to mean that they were not to reference these sites at all - anywhere. So these national newspapers are now non-existant from a Google point of view. Of course the newspapers are now crying foul and saying that they are happy to be referenced by Google, but just not in the News service. Google on the other hands simply says - 'you wanted out, you are out'.

It raises a question about the power that Google has over us. We, as business owners all assume that we have the right to be listed on Google. In fact it is a service provided by Google that is purely disctretionary and theoretically could be turned off at any point in time. What would that mean for your business?