I briefly had dealings with Google on a similar issue. There is a concept in US and perhaps other law, "tortuous interference" where a third party does wrong by

I briefly had dealings with Google on a similar issue. There is a concept in US and perhaps other law, "tortuous interference" where a third party does wrong by interfering with business between two other parties. Think someone refusing to let you walk into a store because it sells meat or leather. It's possible that google could run afoul of these things. In practice I've yet to see any offensive use of delisting, aside from one case of a Belgian newspaper which I may well be recalling in correctly. They are very aware of their position and have not abused it. edit: ah, this is the case: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/belgian-papers-demand-huge-fine-from-google-news.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/belgian-pape... Google lost a copyright battle against some Belgian newspapers for news.google.be. So they delisted ALL pages from those papers. "When Google lost the case, it not only pulled the stories from the News archive and stopped indexing them, but it yanked the papers from its main index. Apparently, this wasn't good for business, and the papers soon worked out a deal to get back in the index while remaining out of Google News." An example to the others, indeed.