Let’s face it, the French don’t like when their culture gets overrun by cultures from other countries such as let’s say those countries where people show a proclivity to wear cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats. Perhaps Chirac had a bad experience while watching Dallas a few decades back and he never got over it. You know I ate French fries once while coming down with the flu and I couldn’t eat fries for a few months. In Chirac’s case it is obviously more serious.

So obviously seeing Google control the Internet is upsetting the French and French businesses. We know that the EU is trying to establish a Google competitor and now a newspaper association based in France is thinking about legal action against Google for the Google News service.

At this point it is too late to sue Google for Google News. It has such widespread readership that to come off of Google News is not possible. Getting Google to pay you for showing your headlines and photos is also not going to happen. Still it is worth a try I suppose as newspapers are scared to death that they are becoming irrelevant and their services commoditized.

In effect they are and others have predicted that Google News will soon be able to write its own news in an automated fashion from existing news online. Now that is a scary thought for the publishing world.