Sticking With The Business Model Is Offensive, And Works

Michael Hedges September 30, 2019 - Follow on Twitter

Everybody knows news publishers are starving. They tell us everyday on their pages, printed and otherwise. It has been the same, sad story for most of this century. They have been robbed by the internet, which has stolen their readers (bad), advertising (very bad) and influence (terrible). Journalists, photographers, editors and cartoonists would cede their jobs while teams of lobbyists descended on unsuspecting legislators. There must be a law, they said.

French publishers were informed last week that the folks at Google have no intention of paying them to index anything. After the European Commission modified its Copyright Directive in April, Member States are now at liberty to extract payments for snippets and photos within search engine indexing describing the content. France is first to try this out, its revised law coming into effect October 1st. It was met with a very direct “non.”

“When the French law comes into force, we will no longer display an overview of the content in France for European press publishers unless the publisher has made the arrangements to indicate that it is his wish,” explained Google vice president for news Richard Gingras in a statement (September 25). “This will be the case for search results from all Google services.” Links to European news sources in France will be displayed, heretofore, with “very short” extracts, meaning partial headlines and nothing else. So far Google will not identify links behind paywalls as such.

“We don’t accept payment from anyone to be included in search results,” he added. “We sell ads, not search results, and every ad on Google is clearly marked. That’s also why we don’t pay publishers when people click on their links in a search result. To operate in any other way would reduce the choice and relevance to our users and would ultimately result in the loss of their trust in our services.” Google’s news aggregation business model has not changed.

Each Member State has some discretion in bring national law into compliance with the Copyright Directive as amended. The Directive must be transposed into national law by June 2021. France is first. Poland may be very late as in May the government filed with the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) to annul the Directive as preventative censorship, forbidden under Polish law.

The “link tax” or “snippet tax” enshrined in the Copyright Directive amendments has a storied history in Europe. A previous Spanish government wrote it into law in 2014. The response from Google was the same as it is today. The Spanish government was undeterred and Google News closed the Spanish portal. Spanish publishers, particularly smaller and local portals, lost contact with the rest of the world.

Germany’s experiment in futility came the following year. Google executives simply restated the obvious. German publishers, led by Axel Springer, discovered significant internet traffic losses with the accompanying ad revenue dip. Unlike the Spanish law, the German version allowed an opt-out. Publishers quickly, and grudgingly, reached no-fee licensing agreements. Actually, there was a 2013 “snippet tax” passed in Germany, a precursor to current laws. It fell to an ECJ ruling two weeks ago (September 12) for the government’s failure to promptly inform the European Commission, a technicality. (See more about copyright law here)

“Google’s statements on the issue of compensation are not admissible,” said French Culture Minister Franck Riester, quoted by euractiv.eu (September 26). Every media issue in France travels through the Culture Ministry. “The political objective pursued by the creation of the neighbouring right, and its translation into law, are obvious: to allow a fair sharing of the value produced, for the benefit of platforms, by press content. From this point of view, Google’s proposal is not acceptable. I call for a genuine global negotiation between Google and the publishers: the unilateral definition of the rules of the game is contrary both to the spirit of the directive and to its text. I will be meeting with my European counterparts to address this situation very soon.”

“You can’t have the choice between appearing and disappearing,” said Les Echos-Le Parisien chief executive Pierre Louette. Or, widely attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

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