French news sites prevailed in negotiations with Google over “related rights”, a new legal right granted by the 2019 EU Copyright Directive. An agreement between Google and the French news industry “establishes a framework within which Google will negotiate individual licensing agreements “with individual news organizations, according to Google. Under these deals, French news articles will be featured in a new Google product called News Showcase.
This is not the result that Google wanted. For years, European news organizations have tried to force Google to pay them for the privilege of indexing their articles, and for years Google has adamantly refused to do so. When Spain passed legislation to force Google to pay to link to Spanish news organizations in 2014, Google responded by shutting down Google News in Spain.
Google tried to use the same manual in France after the approval of the EU copyright directive. France was the first country to transpose the EU directive into its own laws. In 2019, Google announced that it would stop displaying “snippets” of French news articles in search results. Google believed that showing only news headlines, not short snippets of articles, would bring it into compliance with the new law.
But that move was rebuked by France’s competition regulator, who considered the move likely to be an abuse of Google’s monopoly power. Google holds about 90% of the French search market. The French Competition Authority considered that the agreement that Google offered to news sites – let us index your site for free or we will not index it at all – was an abuse of that market power and contrary to the spirit of the new French law .
French authorities ordered Google to conduct “good faith negotiations” with the news industry to decide how much Google would pay news sites for its content. And they made it clear that the number had better not be zero.
These negotiations were apparently successful, although Google’s announcement offers few details about the new structure.
“The remuneration that is included in these license agreements is based on criteria such as the publisher’s contribution to political and general information, the daily volume of publications and their monthly traffic on the Internet”, informs the announcement.
The deal is particularly significant because it offers a model for other European countries that want to force Google to shell out money for their own news sites.
In the past, Google’s stubborn tactics have prevented most European countries from trying to force Google to pay. But with the approval of the EU’s copyright directive, European countries formed a united front against Google, making it much more difficult for Google to resist. Google’s capitulation in France will weaken its bargaining position as other European countries pass their own versions of French law and news organizations in other countries line up to receive their share of Google’s money.