Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG): Brazil’s newspaper association bars from using its news content

Google Inc(NASDAQ:GOOG) is facing difficulties in Brazil where a leading newspaper association has decided to bar the company from using headlines from stories in newspaper and its contents on it search results.

The national Association of Newspapers, which has a membership of 154 publications across the country has decided to clamp down on the use of content by Google as it feels that the publicity is not dong them any good.

On the contrary, the association said that Google News was taking away traffic from their sites while it was not paying them for the content.

Staying with Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences, on the contrary," said the association's president, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. "By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites."

The association and Google News had entered into a partnership in 2010, wherein the allowed the Internet search giant to repost the first few lines of stories appearing in Brazil's newspapers.

The current decision has come as result of the association feeling that the experiment has failed.

 "The loss of online traffic caused by the newspapers’ departure from Google News hasn’t made AJN change its position since," The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reported.

Lindenberg told Knight, "Google News’ presence in the Brazilian market is small. We believe (the loss of traffic) is an acceptable price to protect our content and brands."

Now AJN, as the association is known in the country, says that it would allow Google News to use their content only if it paid for it.