Close on the heels of a petition by French news publishers to the French government to ask Internet search giant Google to pay up for listing their news content in its index, the Brazilian newspaper association - which accounts for 90 percent of the newspaper circulation in Brazil - has now decided to ban Google News from accessing their website content.

Elaborating the reason behind the decision to dump Google News, Brazil's National Association of Newspapers - which is also called the AJN, and comprises 154 member newspapers - said that Google was accessing their content for free and was, in the process, drawing off user traffic from their websites.

The AJN also revealed that, ever since 2010, the association has been working with Google, which has been allowed to re-post not only the headlines of Brazilian news reports, but also the opening sentences of articles from newspapers.

However, noting that the experimental move with Google News had "failed" because Google had not been paying up for the Brazilian-newspaper content that it re-posts, the AJN said that the association had finally decided to end it cooperation with the company.

Noting that the AJN's working with Google News "was not helping us grow our digital audiences," AJN president Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, said in a recent interview: "By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites."