On Thursday, the French authorities finally realized the impossible: getting Google to agree to pay the licensing fees they spent on the news more than half a decade begging.
The decision came after “many months of negotiations” with the French competition authority after that orderly the tech giant will start negotiating licensing fees with local news publishers as early as April last year. Specifically, the Competition Authority took the issue with Google’s mandate to give EU publishers a free way to access their content if they wanted their articles to be displayed on products such as Google Search or Google News.
The reasoning here, as Richard Gingras, Google’s vice president, said blog post at that time, the company “[sells] ads, not search results. ”
“We do not accept payment from anyone to be included in search results,” he continued. “That’s why we don’t pay publishers when people click on their links in a search result.”
Regional publishers denounced the mistake pretty fastand no one was stronger in this respect than the French. The country was the first and so far the only player in the EU to adopted the ‘copyright reform’ law proposed by the European Union, which was passed by the EU parliament in March 2019 before being officially implemented across France the following October.
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Among a fair share of others semi-controversial statutes, a bottleneck for technology companies around the world has been a new set of legal rights that allow publishers to track players like Facebook, Google and others if they fail to provide “fair and proportionate compensation” for “digital use” of assets their press release.
It’s the kind of legal requirement that seems hard to get rid of, but Google practiced it until late. When the Spanish authorities adopted a similar set of anti-competitive measures on copyright in 2012, Google chose to hang up Google news for the whole country instead of complying. When Google largely avoided the German version of these mandates that the country put into practice in 2013, major publishers done quickly that boycotting Google’s advertising business would make them throw their own – and it would be better to give up their free content rather than wage that war. Years later, when a consortium of German publishers came to take Google to court for some of these – I’ll just say – extrusion tactics, German law enforcement officials on the part of the company anyway.
And that doesn’t even touch the problem happening in Australia right now, in connection with its own proposed copyright protection mandate – an idea that Google does its best lobby against. So you can see why choosing the company to eventually enter one of these major markets is an important change.
What Google-France handshake will look like in practice is still being removed. One blog post, Google said it will “negotiate individual license agreements” with a selection of sites that have marked them IPG certification together with the French government for their work in publishing “political and general information”. Since that term is an original French translation of the corporate blog post, I contacted Google to get an idea of whether the distinction is as absurdly broad as it seems in English.
Instead, the answer was somehow More confused. A company spokesman clarified that the position of a site as a source for this type of information comes from “human, material and financial investments made by publishers and news agencies, together with the contribution that these players make “political and general information and the importance of using press publications. ”
The regional authority issuing this certification – The Joint Commission on Publications and Press Agencies (or only CPPAP) defines an exit from the sphere of political and general history as one:
whose main purpose is to provide, on a permanent and continuous basis, information, analysis and commentary on local, national or international political and general news that could shed light on citizens’ judgment.
“This information must be of interest that significantly exceeds the concerns of a category of readers,” CPPAP continues, adding that these sites must employ at least one “professional journalist” and must promise not to interfere in the stories. which distorts “violence”. or pornographic ”. In other words, general rules they are simple enough that any reputable publisher is not too worried about getting the IPG approval stamp.
Google does not clarify these details in the blog, but they do do what keep in mind that his donation calculations will take into account some difficult numbers, such as the number of stories a outlet publishes per day and the monthly readers these stories end up getting.
But at the end of the day, the distinction between what is and is not a “general” or “political” story is still subjective. Gizmodo dot com, for example, reveals correct action of political stories, but he also hosts dog blogs, carp blogs, and the occasional play about how weird it is the shells have eyes. Is this “general” enough for CPPAP and Google, anyway? How will Google distinguish political journalism from political clickbait when do you dedicate your dollar? How come newsletters factor in this decision? Dear God, how about op-ed columns?
As with any major Google policy decision, these types of cars are left in some vague dark pit that the company will not reveal and – if what we saw in Germany is still valid today – it finally knows that it should not. Somehow, even when publishers celebrate their small victories against Google, they are still caught in a cycle in which all they can do is lose.
Update 16:21 ET: Google reply added.