Google will not pay press publishers in France to display their content | Denis Chalet/AFP via Getty Images
The announcement pours cold water on publishers’ hopes of getting more money from Google after an EU reform of online copyright law.
Google will not pay press publishers in France to display their content and will instead change the way articles appear in search results, a senior executive said on Wednesday.
The announcement pours cold water on publishers’ hopes of obtaining more money from the tech giant for displaying their content under the European Union’s new copyright regime, which France was the first to transpose into national law.
“We don’t accept payment from anyone to be included in search results. We sell ads, not search results, and every ad on Google is clearly marked. That’s also why we don’t pay publishers when people click on their links in a search result,” Richard Gingras, vice president for news at Google, said in a blogpost
France is so far the only country to have transposed the European Union’s copyright reform’s new right for press publishers into a national law, which comes into force in October. The EU copyright directive’s Article 15, formerly known as Article 11, allows the press to request money from platforms such as Google and Facebook when they display their content online.
It was the result of years of lobbying by Europe’s biggest publishing houses in Brussels which had pushed for this new so-called “neighboring right” to help them gain bargaining power against tech giants and shift advertising revenue from Google and Facebook back to news organizations. (Axel Springer, POLITICO Europe’s co-owner, is an active participant in the debate.)
According to estimates by some press publishers in France, the loss of revenues for their sector due to Google and Facebook’s power in the online advertising market ranges between €250 million and €320 million euros per year.
Publishers were hoping the neighboring right would “compensate” that loss — but Google’s announcement suggests the hopes were unfounded.
To apply the new copyright rules in France, Google will instead change the way news results appear on its search engine by removing so-called snippets, or short excerpts from the article.
“When the French law comes into force, we will not show preview content in France for a European news publication unless the publisher has taken steps to tell us that’s what they want,” the tech giant said in a separate blog post.
Hyperlinks and “very short extracts” of press articles are not covered by the neighboring right, meaning Google can display them on the platforms without signing a licensing agreement.
In Germany, where a neighboring right existed prior to the EU directive, many German publishers decided to give Google their content for free after their traffic plummeted when snippets no longer appeared on search results.
Google also emphasized other ways the tech giant helps the news industry.
“Beyond the traffic we send to publishers, we continue to invest in and provide value to the news industry in other ways. Google’s advertising technologies are used by many websites, including news publishers, where publishers retain the vast majority of the ad revenue. In 2018, Google sent 14.5 billion dollars to publishers around the world,” Gingras said.