Well it seems that Australia (Google News) is keen on joining countries like Belgium by banning the indexing and archiving of web based content – something that Google claims will blast the country back to the pre-Internet era – all in the name of copyright protection.
Australia wants website owners to opt into a search engine, rather than opting out. Technically I don’t think this will be that difficult, you just need a new Auzzie/Belgium robots.txt file that says what the regular robots file does, but in reverse… then you have to get all the search engines to write code to look for this new file and in the process re-index every single file originating from that country. I think the latter one would be the nightmare – what if you have someone down under using a US host for their website with a .com address? The brain just starts to hurt. Of course, it may be easier or harder, but in a world that is now driven by information and where the value is not how much information one has, but how that information is presented and made use of why limit how that information gets out there? Granted one has to think a little altruistically, but is that really such a bad thing?
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