Is this another "Sign of the Times?"

@andygogo (1579)
China
January 2, 2007 9:21pm CST
From: (news services) Agence France Presse - of more aptly name AFP (pronounced afffppp) has decided that they no longer wish to be an international news service. Missing the point entirely as regards international exposure of their news service, afffppp took umbrage at their news stories being available to a large portion of the international community and decided to sue Google.com - the world's largest search engine service - for showing afffppp news stories and photos on Google.com's "Google News." The lawsuit was entered into in the District Court in the District of Columbia - Washington D.C. since the French court couldn't stop laughing. Envisioning their soon to be non-existent international exposure and massive loss of advertising revenue resulting from their quest to ask the American court system to forbid Google from including its content in Google News, afffppp is asking for at least $17.5 million from Google to try and offset those losses. An afffppp spokesman - a copy-boy in the agency's North America headquarters in Washington, D.C.; the only person left in the headquarters save the moving company employees, declined to comment on the lawsuit. When questioned by this reporter, several of the other 4,500 news services whose stories appear regularly on Google News could not answer due their laughing fits. Several were also severely overworked as they answered the influx of calls from new potential advertisers that were fleeing from their association with what will now be a "seen in France only" news service. afffppp has said that the revenue they will lose from advertising are not important to them. When asked why they did not simply do what many news agencies did and set up a free registration service through which their advertisers could better target their advertising, representatives of afffppp said "What are you talking about? Nobody told us we could do that." When contacted by this reporter, a Google.com spokesperson who declined to be identified, said "We will immediately remove all stories from afffppp from our Google News service. We will also begin the process of removing any mention of afffppp from our Google.com search service. All links to afffppp will be closed, and within a short time, any requests made in Google for Agence France Presse, AFP, or afffppp - including mention of any website they still have available afterwards, will result in a "404 File Not Found" message. We will insure that in the future that the words Agence France Presse, or any other form of identification of the now 'local France only' news outlet, will not show up on any Google service. We at Google.com wish to be good corporate citizens and if afffppp has decided to remove themselves from status as an international news service then we are happy to comply." When contacted by this reporter, several government agencies in various countries suggested that this was a new method of removing mention of news the government agencies desired to keep secret and it would now be studied for possible use against other companies. In a Washington D.C. street-side interview, a man identified as a Mr. Donald Rumsfeld was quoted as saying "Damn straight! If it wasn't for that damn Google we could get away with anything and nobody would be the wiser. What's the good of being able to coerce our local news media when the truth is so freely available on Google News? Nobody would have ever heard of Abu Ghraib if we could have done this en masse." When asked why he used a French language descriptive in his answer, Mr. Rumsfeld replied - "Que?" Further updates from this reporter - perhaps - as the story unfolds.
1 response
• United States
3 Jan 07
I doubt Rumsfeld would give a 3rd rate "news" source the time of day. You find the most interesting crap to discuss it always makes me think, gotta hand it to you, you have quite the imagination in re: to the real world. I say this with no sarcasm.