European and many global publishers and newspapers have came together at a conference that included representatives of WAN, the World Editors Forum, the International Publishers Association, the International Federation of the Periodical Press, the European Federation of Magazine Publishers, the European Publishers Council, the European Magazine Publishers Association, AFP and several French organizations to stand united against the Search engine companies. Their take was to examine ways to receive payment from Internet search engines and news aggregators that are making money by taking someone else's content for free.

These associations and organizations are demanding that the standards and policies should be framed that would define the commercial relationship between publishers and search engines, such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., and content aggregators. They want the copyrights to be enforced and to put and end to brand infringement

WAN president and chairman of the publishers’ task force, Gavin O’Reilly said, “The search engines are increasingly aiming their strategic efforts at traditional content originators and aggregators like newspaper publishers. The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their expense."

To add concrete base to his statement O'Reilly quoted the example of Napster file sharing service provider. A few years ago, Napster was forced to bring about fundamental changes in the way it operated because of a music industry lawsuit that objected to Napster allowing users to share songs for free. A similar motion needs to be passed between the search engines and the traditional news media & content aggregators.

O’ Reilly emphasizes, “Google, Yahoo and other search engines are not social benefactors of information. They are very much commercial outfits that are very-much-for-profit organizations.”

The impact of search engines has been such that many newspapers in the United States are increasingly seeing their readership tumble down the statistics since more number of people are turning to web for daily news.

Even before the conference was held, small efforts by individual publishing and content aggregation companies have already started showing up. For example, Google is facing a US lawsuit that was filed against it in October 2005 by a major book publisher that objected to the search engine digitizing and storing library books without the permission of copyright holders. Similarly, It has another case pending, filed against it by Agaence France-Presse (AFP) in March 2005 for lifting photos and stories from its subscribers' websites and offering them to Google users.