France makes billion euro tax claim against Google

This basically seems like a tax on hyperlinking, which is at the core of the web. Absurd.

A Forbes article (http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/10/30/explainin...) explains further that the complaint from French publishers is about the portion of the search results page that shows links to those publishers' content (since that results page has ads on it). They could exclude themselves from indexing easily (and forego traffic of course).