Eric Scherer (partnership director at the French Press Agency AFP) has twittered about a violent meeting between Google and the French top newspaper (it's part of a summit between the government and the newspapers).

Lagardère Media (revenue 2007: 8,5B €) says they're "on the verge of putting a case of predatory practices in Brussels".

Le Figaro now considers Google as their "worst enemy". They complain that Google is a "black box" for them, and that they don't receive "a part of the Google France's revenue".

Google was represented by Josh Cohen (Google News PM) et Mats Carduner (director Google France). They promised to offer better tools to newpaper (iGoogle, APIs...), to increase the time users spend on media website (!), to improve display ads value (via DoubleClick, but Google acknowledges that display will face a harsh year). Google want to convince that "every page is the home page".

More to come (there's a second meeting right now).

Here's a (French) summary from AFP: http://mediawatch.afp.com/?post/2008/12/11/Etats-Generaux-:-Google-en-position-daccuse
Eric Scherer first twit: http://twitter.com/EricScherer/status/1051870619

Google was represented by Josh Cohen (Google News PM) et Mats Carduner (director Google France) -> Google was represented by Josh Cohen (Google News PM) and Mats Carduner (director Google France)

None the less I don't really get the problem... or do they mind that users can read rss feeds directly in igoogle or something...

All the top newspaper in France has header-only-but-with-lots-of-ads feeds. How can they blame Google for retaining readers on Google's sites?

Their stupid feed policy explain largely why rss doesn't go mainstream :'(