In February 2006, as reported in our weblog, Google announced its plan to localize many of its products into Hebrew. On March 7, 2006, in a surprise move that caught many industry insiders off guard, Google launched its News site in Hebrew (http://news.news.google.co.il). The site, which is similar in format and functionality to the Google News sites in other languages, functions as an aggregator and posts articles from leading Israeli newspapers and news websites.
Some Israeli analysts see this move as a threat to the larger news and media conglomerates (such as Yediot Aharonot, Maariv and Ha'aretz) who enjoyed a de-facto monopoly for the last 50 years. Now, with the emergence of news portals such as Google, the barriers between the public and the media have been lowered dramatically, significantly weakening the control that the press had on both the public and the government.
The launch of Google's News site also created waves on the legal front, with one key local media company threatening to sue Google over copyright infringement if they continue to reuse their stories. The attorneys for Walla, a popular Israel search engine and news portal (which is owned by the Ha'aretz group), sent a cease and desist letter to Google. Ilan Israeli, CEO of Walla, was quoted as saying that "collection of news stories from leading web portals in Israel crosses the lines and represents a severe blow to copyright protection, . . . . I am sure that other leading web portals in Israel will not lend a hand to this attack on their intellectual property and will demand that Google cease to use their content."
This legal challenge comes on the heels of Perfect 10's lawsuit against Google on its use of their pornographic thumbnail images. Nathan Stoll, Google News chief's response: "If there are publishers and news portals that do not wish to be part of Google's News service, we will not include them in the service and we will remove them. We will respond to the letter that we received (from Walla, ed.) and we will try to reach an agreement with them."
It appears that Israel is providing a fertile testing ground for various legal issues that may be relevant to Google operations worldwide. In 2005 an Israeli company, Anna Koren, sued Google for allowing their competitors to bid on the name of the company founder as a keyword (Global Translations provided the legal translation for Google's attorneys in Israel). Israel, with one of the highest per capita number of lawyers in the world, serves as a potent test bed for some of the potential legal problems facing Google as it continues its path towards domination of the gigantic industry it itself has helped create.
8:41:58 AM 
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