A Clash Across Europe Over the Value of a Click

Google got rich by selling a simple proposition: The links it provides to other Web sites are worth a lot of money, so much that millions of advertisers are willing to pay the company billions of dollars for them. Now some European newspaper and magazine publishers, frustrated by their inability to make more of their own money from the Web, want to reverse the equation.

Google, they say, should pay them for links, because they provide the material on which the Web giant is generating all that revenue. In several of the biggest European countries, they are close to getting their way. A bill working its way through the German Parliament would enable publishers to collect a fee from Google and other search engines and news “aggregators” when they display excerpts from news articles alongside links to newspaper and magazine Web sites.