Google demonstrates its power over newspaper publishers in the EU

American search engine company Google is showing strength to publishers, regulators and news readers by removing all news articles from European Union (EU) based publishers from its search results. The company announced this in a blog post To. Google itself talks about “small, time-limited tests”. It should show impact on data traffic and search results.

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However, Google will remove relevant news articles from search results for only one percent of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Google justified the move, saying regulatory authorities and publishers in the EU “have requested additional data about the impact of news content in search on users’ use of our products.” The search engine giant said it would continue to show results from websites and news providers based outside the EU. Once the test is finished, the message results will be displayed again as before.

Google demonstrates its power over newspaper publishers in the EU

Even though this is just a small test, according to Google, this flexing of the muscles serves as a warning. Especially since the group emphasizes that it “has long provided publishers with detailed data about how their content performs on our platform, including tools to understand traffic patterns.” The hope is that “this testing will provide even more useful, objective data,” Google added. Newspaper publishers will use the data obtained to see how much traffic they would miss without Google. But Google will also get data on how much its users are actually interested in news.

Dispute over payment to writers

There has been debate for several years about the display of news in Google search results and potential copyright payments to publishers and authors. Google has strongly opposed rules that would force the company to compensate publishers for their content. However, in the EU, Google is obliged to comply with the European Copyright Directive. To implement this, Google says it has signed licensing agreements for “expanded news previews” for more than 4,000 publications in 20 EU countries.

However, earlier this year, the French Competition Authority (Autorité de la Competition) sentenced Google to a fine of 250 million euros. The company had used content from publishers and news agencies to train its own AI models without notifying those affected and, above all, without giving them the right to do so.

conflict elsewhere too

Not only the EU with its copyright policy, Canada has also created a regulation with the Online News Act, according to which Google and Meta must pay for pointing readers to media reports. But the project was in a dilapidated condition. Google stops linking to news in Canada. The Canadian government finally gave in and significantly reduced the so-called link tax for Google to keep the losses from getting out of control. Google got a discount; To do this, the company pays 100 million Canadian dollars annually into a fund plus inflation adjustments.

In the US state of California, Google warned non-profit newsrooms that passage of a new California law to tax online advertising would threaten the company’s future investments in the US news industry. To avoid the law, Google prefers to voluntarily pay millions to publishers. Journalists still call the deal a disaster.

(AKN)