On Thursday, the French authorities finally achieved the impossible: getting Google to pay the news outlets the license fees they issued more than half a decade beg for.
The decision came after “many months of negotiations” with the French competition authority ordered the tech giant to negotiate licensing fees with local news outlets in April last year. In particular the Autorité de la Concurrence took a problem with Google’s mandate requiring publishers in the EU to give the company a free hand to access the content if they wanted their stories to be displayed on products such as Google Search or Google News.
The rationale here, as Google VP Richard Gingras in one blog post was at the time that the company “[sells] ads, not search results. ”
“We don’t accept payments 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 called error fairly quickly, and no one was louder about this than the French. The country was the first and so far only player in the EU to do this adopted the law proposed by the European Union on “copyright reform” which was approved by the EU Parliament in March 2019 before it officially entered into force throughout France in October.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Among a fair share of others semi-controversial statutesA bottleneck for the world’s tech companies was a new set of legal rights that would allow publishers to go after players like Facebook, Google and their ilk if they don’t provide “fair and proportionate compensation” for the “digital use” of their press assets.
It’s the kind of legal requirement that seems tricky to get out of, but Google has had a lot of practice lately. When the authorities in Spain long ago took a similar set of anti-competitive copyright measures in 2012, Google chose it shut down Google News for the whole country instead of complying. When Google largely eschewed the German version of these mandates that the country put into practice in 2013, major publishers came quickly realized that boycotting Google’s adtech business would cause their own business to crash – and they’d better give up their content for free instead of waging that war. Years later, when a German publishing consortium finally took Google to court over some of these – I’ll just say – expelling tactics, German court officials came sided with the company anyway.
And that doesn’t even hit the kerfuffle happens in Australia now about its own proposed copyright mandate – an idea Google is doing its very best on lobby against. So you can kind of see why the company’s choice to finally go into one of these big markets is a big shift.
What the handshake between Google and France looks like in practice is still being ironed out. In a blog post, Google said it will “negotiate individual licensing agreements” with a selection of sites that have earned their score IPG certification with the French government for publishing ‘political and general information’. Since that term is a translation of the original French of the company blog post, we reached out to Google to get an insight into whether the distinction is as absurdly wide as it sounds in English.
Instead, the answer was somehow Lake confusing. A company spokesperson clarified that a site’s reputation 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 these players make “on political and general information and the importance of using press publications. “
The regional authority that issues this certification – La Commission paritaire des publications et agences de presse (or simply CPPAP) defines an outlet in the political and general story world as one:
whose primary purpose is to provide permanent and continuous information, analysis and commentary on local, national or international politics and general news that may shed light on public judgment.
“This information must be material that significantly transcends the concerns of a category of readers,” continues the CPPAP, adding that these sites must employ at least one “professional journalist,” and pledge not to grapple with stories that are “violent. or pornographic. ”In other words, the general rules are so simple that any reputable publisher shouldn’t have to worry too much about getting the IPG approval.
Google doesn’t clarify these details in the blog, but it does is doing Keep in mind that donation calculations take into account certain hard numbers, such as the number of stories an outlet pumps out per day and the monthly readership these stories eventually collect.
But at the end of the day, the distinction between what is and is not a “general” or “political” story is still a subjective story. Gizmodo dot com, for example, brings its fair parts of political stories, but is also home to dog blogs, carp blogs, and the occasional piece about how frigging weird that is shellfish have eyes. Is that “generic” enough for CPPAP – and Google for that matter? How does Google distinguish between political journalism and political clickbait when handing out his dollars? How to do newsletters factor in this decision? Dear god, what about the opinion columns?
As is the case with just about every major Google policy decision, machinations like this are left behind by some dim dark pit that the company won’t disclose, and – if what we’ve seen in Germany still holds true – ultimately knows it doesn’t have to. Somehow, even as publishers celebrate their own little wins against Google, they’re still stuck in a cycle where they can only lose.
Update 4:21 PM ET: Comment from Google added.