Google refuses to pay publishers under the Article 15 of EU copyright directive

Tech giant Google has announced that it will refuse to pay publishers to list their content in search’s news aggregation, flying in the face of the measures imposed by the European Union’s (EU) copyright reform. Instead of showing snippets of European news stories, Google News feed will now only display previews and thumbnail images from the news stories unless the publishers agree to provide them with the content for free.

The announcement let down publishers' hopes of obtaining more money from the tech giant for displaying their content under the European Union's new copyright regime, which France was the first to transpose into national law, which will take effect in October, and is the first country to clash with a major news aggregator on the matter.

Article 15 (formerly Article 11) of the European Copyright Directive, which was adopted by the European Council in April, forces online platforms and aggregators to pay press publishers to use their content.

This so-called “link tax” would be applied to snippets and previews of articles – such as those used in Google News and search results – but does not extend to hyperlinks, “very short extracts” or individual words used to describe them.

Individual European Union (EU) member states have two years to create legislation to match. France is the first to do so.

Google had warned the EU before the directive was passed about the potential pitfalls that publishers would run into if such a rule was passed into bloc-wide law.

The company ran an experiment with “Search” at the beginning of the year which involved limiting the detail in the preview of the content it aggregated and included in Search. The findings showed that when Google limited the detail in the search listings, even in the least deleterious instances, it led to a 45% reduction in traffic for the publisher. Instead, users turned to other platforms like social media to get their news fix.

According to Richard Gingras, the company’s Vice President for news, people trust Google to help them find useful and authoritative information, from a diverse range of sources and to uphold that trust, search results must be determined by relevance and not by commercial partnerships.

Gingras said that the company won’t accept payment from anyone to be included in search results. He further said “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.”

According to Google, operating in any other way would reduce the choice and relevance to its users – and would ultimately result in the loss of users’ trust in the services provided by Google. Gingras added that while newspapers and magazines pay newsstands to display their titles, Google provided such benefits to publishers cost-free.

According to Google, it helps publishers grow their traffic for free by providing comprehensive news aggregation which allows users to easily find publishers’ content.