Brazil’s main newspapers that account for about 90 percent of the country’s circulation have abandoned Google News, banning the search engine section from using their headlines.

The papers say Google News was not paying for their content and was no longer boosting traffic to their websites, and was in fact driving traffic away.

In an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, the president of Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers (ANJ) said:

Google News benefits commercially from [our] quality content and is unwilling to discuss a remuneration model for the production of these materials.

We concluded (…) that staying in Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences. On the contrary, by providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the changes that they will look at the entire story in our web sites.

Under the ANJ’s recommendation, the news sites under the ANJ have begun opting out of the Google News service, saying that the search engine’s “presence in the Brazilian market is small. We believe (the loss of traffic) is an acceptable price to protect our content and brands.”