Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt met with French President François Hollande on Monday amid a revenue row with French, German and Italian media firms who want the Internet giant to pay for content, reports The Economic Times.
Google, which receives four billion hits worldwide every month, has warned it will exclude French media sites from its search results if France adopts a bill that forces search engines to pay for linking to its news sites.
Italian and German firms have also joined the demand that the search engine should share some of the advertising revenue from user searches for news in media websites.
France's communication and culture minister Aurélie Filippetti on Monday adopted a combative tone ahead of the meeting.
"This European drive will not allow us to be penniless," she said on France Inter radio. "We must not think that all the fights against Internet giants are a lost cause."
Filippetti, who is also due to meet Schmidt, said it "was only normal that big search engines contribute to finance the press."
A letter sent by Google to several French ministerial offices this month said it "cannot accept" such a move and the company "as a consequence would be required to no longer reference French sites," according to a copy obtained by AFP.
Google said a law would "threaten (Google's) very existence".
Leading French newspaper publishers last month called on the government to adopt legislation imposing a settlement in the long-running dispute with Google, forcing it and other search engines to share some of the advertising revenue.
Their demand follows the German government approving in August draft legislation that would force search engines to pay commissions to German media websites.
But it has not been adopted due to opposition from leftist parties in parliament.
Olivier Esper, a director at Google France, has warned that such a move will "be harmful both for the Internet and its users."
According to France's Le Figaro newspaper, Hollande appears favourable to forcing the Internet giant to pay for linking to newspapers.
Filippetti told a parliamentary commission last week that she backed the idea, calling it "a tool that seems important to me to develop".
She said she was surprised by the tone of Google's letter, telling AFP that "you don't deal with a democratically-elected government with threats."
Read more of this AFP report published by The Economic Times.