On Thursday, French authorities finally achieved the impossible: getting Google to agree to pay news agencies the license fees they spent more than half a decade begging.
The decision came after “many months of negotiations” with the French competition authority. ordered the tech giant is due to start negotiating licensing fees with local news publishers in April last year. Specifically, the Autorité de la Concurrence had a problem with Google’s mandate, which required EU-based publishers to offer the company free rein to access its content if they wanted their stories to be displayed on products like Google Search or Google News.
The justification here, as Google Vice President Richard Gingras put it in a blog post at the time, it was that the company “[sells] ads, not search results. ”
“We do not accept payment from anyone to be included in the survey results,” he continued. “That’s also why we don’t pay publishers when people click on their links in a search result.”
Regional publishers call lack very quick, and nobody spoke louder about it than the French. The country was the first and so far the only player in the EU adopted the European Union’s “copyright reform” bill, which was voted on in the EU parliament in March 2019 before being officially put into action across France in the following October.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Among a good number of others semi-controversial statutes, a critical point for technology companies around the world was a new set of legal rights that allowed publishers to go after players like Facebook, Google and others of the same kind if they failed to offer “fair and proportionate pay” for the “digital use” of its press assets.
It’s the kind of legal requirement that it seems hard to escape, but Google has had a lot of practice lately. When authorities in Spain enacted a similar set of anti-competitive copyright measures a long time ago in 2012, Google chose turn off Google News for the entire country instead of complying. When Google largely shunned the German version of those mandates that the country put in place in 2013, major publishers quickly realized that boycotting Google’s adtech business would plummet its own – and they’d better give up their content for free instead of waging this war. Years later, when a consortium of German publishers ended up taking Google to court for some of these – I’ll just say – extraction tactics, German justice officials company side anyway.
And it’s not even touching the turmoil happening in australia now about his own proposed copyright mandate, an idea that Google is doing its best to lobby against. Then, you can see why the company’s choice to finally give in to one of these important markets is a big change.
The appearance of the Google-France handshake in practice is still being resolved. On a blog post, Google said it will “negotiate individual license agreements” with a selection of sites that scored their IPG Certification with the French government for its work of publishing “political and general information”. Since this term is a translation from the original French of the corporate blog post, we contacted Google to get some information on whether the distinction is as absurdly wide as it looks in English.
Instead, the answer was somehow More confused. AN company spokesperson clarified that the position of a website as a source for this type of information comes from “human, material and financial investments made by publishers and news agencies, along with the contribution of these players “political and general information and the importance of using publications in the press. “
The regional authority that issues this certification – La Commission paritaire des publications et agences de presse (or just CPPAP) defines a way out in the sphere of political and general history as one:
whose main objective is to provide, on a permanent and continuous basis, information, analysis and comments on news of a general nature, of a local, national or international character, which may shed light on the judgment of citizens.
“This information should be of interest, significantly exceeding the concerns of a category of readers,” continues CPPAP, adding that these sites must employ at least one “professional journalist” and must promise not to be involved in stories that distort “violent or pornographic” . ”In other words, the general rules they are simple enough that any reputable publisher is not too concerned with obtaining the IPG seal of approval.
Google does not clarify these details on the blog, but does note that your donation calculations will take into account certain concrete numbers, such as the number of stories that an outlet launches per day and the monthly number of readers that these stories end up accumulating.
But at the end of the day, the distinction between what is and what is not a “general” or “political” story is still subjective. Gizmodo dot com, for example, launches its fair to share political stories, but it is also home to dog blogs, carp blogs, and an occasional piece about how weird it is shells have eyes. Is that “general” enough for CPPAP – and Google, by the way? How will Google distinguish between political journalism and political clickbait when distributing your dollars? Like newsletters factor in this decision? Dear God, how about the op-ed columns?
As is the case with almost all major Google policy decisions, these types of machinations are left in some vacant dark hole that the company will not disclose and – if what we saw in Germany is still true today – it knows that it does not need to. Somehow, even when publishers celebrate their small victories against Google, they’re still stuck in a cycle where all they can do is lose.
Update 4:21 pm ET: Added Google response.