Google flexes its muscles against publishers in the EU

The US search engine company Google is demonstrating its strength to publishers, regulators and the news reading public by removing all news articles from publishers based in the European Union (EU) from its search results. The company announced this in a blog post. Google itself speaks of a "small, time-limited test". This is intended to show the impact on data traffic and search results.

However, Google will only remove the news articles in question from search results for one percent of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Regulatory authorities and publishers in the EU had "asked for additional data on the impact of news content in search on users' use of our products", Google explained the move. The search engine giant explained that it will continue to display results from websites and news providers based outside the EU. As soon as the test is over, the news results will be displayed as before.

Even if it is only a small test according to Google, this muscle-flexing comes across as a warning. Especially as the company emphasizes that it has "long provided publishers with detailed data about how their content performs on our platforms, including tools to understand traffic patterns". It is hoped that "this test will provide even more useful, objective data", Google continued. The newspaper publishers will use the data obtained to see exactly how much traffic they would miss out on without Google. But Google will also receive data on how much its users are actually interested in news.

Dispute over payments to authors

The display of news in Google search results and possible copyright payments to publishers and authors have been the subject of dispute for several years. Google has vehemently opposed regulations that would force the company to compensate publishers for their content. In the EU, however, Google is obliged to comply with the European Copyright Directive. To implement this directive, Google has, according to its own information, concluded license agreements for "Extended News Previews" for more than 4,000 publications in 20 EU countries.

At the beginning of this year, however, the French competition authority (Autorité de la Concurrence) ordered Google to pay a fine of 250 million euros. The company had used content from publishers and news agencies to train its own AI models without informing those affected and, above all, without having the right to do so.

Disputes elsewhere too

Not only the EU with its copyright line, but also Canada with its Online News Act has enacted a regulation according to which Google and Meta are to pay for referring readers to media reports. However, the project was a shambles. Google stopped linking to news in Canada without further ado. Canada's government finally gave in and significantly reduced the so-called link tax for Google in order to prevent the damage from getting out of hand. Google received an exemption; in return, the company pays 100 million Canadian dollars plus inflation compensation into a fund every year.

In the US state of California, Google warned non-profit newsrooms that the passing of a new Californian law on the taxation of online advertising would jeopardize the company's future investments in the US news industry. To avert the law, Google prefers to voluntarily pay millions to publishers. Journalists nevertheless call the deal a disaster.

(akn)