Google is considering pulling its Google News service from Europe as regulators work toward a controversial copyright law.
The EU’s Copyright Directive will give publishers the right to demand money from the Alphabet unit, Facebook and other Web platforms when fragments of their articles show up in news search results, or are shared by users.
The law was supposed to be finalized this week, but was delayed by disagreement among member states.
Google News might quit the continent in response to the directive, Google public policy manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa Jennifer Bernal said. The Internet company has various options, and a decision to pull out would be based on a close reading of the rules and taken reluctantly, she said.
“The council needs more time to reflect in order to reach a solid position” on the directive, said a representative of Romania, current head of the European Council, which represents the 28 member nations.
Google has said it does not make money from its news service so it is unlikely the company would take a financial hit from withdrawing.
However, news results keep mobile users coming back to its search engine, where they often pursue queries that generate lucrative ad revenue. Google also competes against rival mobile news-aggregation services from Apple and Facebook.
“I don’t buy the threat — they really need Europe,” said Francois Godard, a European media analyst at Enders Analysis, a research firm.
Google has sometimes underestimated legal trouble in Europe and irritated regulators by being slow to recognize their jurisdiction over the Mountain View, California-based business.
It has waged dozens of battles with privacy authorities, including a 2014 case over the so-called right to be forgotten that forced the company to purge sensitive details from search results.
Disputes with publishers have turned into costly antitrust investigations and a push for more legislation to curb Google’s ability to use content.
Lawmakers are still hashing out how to define small excerpts of stories and whether individual words should be covered by the copyright rules, according to an EU official who asked not to be identified.
The rules would also require Google and Facebook to actively prevent music, videos and other copyrighted content from appearing on their platforms if rights holders did not grant them a license.
Despite the delay, an agreement is possible in the next few months, two EU officials said.
If there is no accord by the spring, when European Parliament elections are held, the process would be delayed until later this year.
As with many divisive issues in European regulation, the problem is the small print. When the commission first unveiled draft rules, it proposed letting publishers waive their rights to demand payment from news-aggregation services.
The European Parliament introduced a provision last year that raises concerns among some small publishers that they would not be able to let Google distribute their content online free of charge.
The impact of a Google News withdrawal on publishers who rely on the search giant for traffic to their sites is unclear. Google shut its news service in Spain in 2014 after the country passed a law requiring Spanish publications to charge aggregators for displaying excerpts of stories.
Publishers must claim compensation for the reuse of fragments of text whether they want to or not.
The Spanish law led to small publishers losing about 13 percent of their Web traffic, according to a 2017 study released by the Spanish Association of Publishers of Periodical Publications.
That translates to a cost of at least 9 million euros (US$10.2 million), the study estimated.
Other publishers were initially opposed to the Spanish law, but argue that Google’s withdrawal did not have much impact.
“The vast majority of Spanish publishers consider Google’s decision insignificant,” said Wout van Wijk, executive director at News Media Europe, an umbrella organization representing national publishers’ associations.
The Spanish Reproduction Rights Center, which negotiates licenses and collects royalties on behalf of members, has struck licensing deals with other news aggregators that emerged after Google left, he said.
The EU decision to work on a similar rule has pitted large publishers against Internet giants, including Google, as well as some small publishers and freedom of speech activists.
“Limiting publishers’ freedom in this way will result in detrimental consequences for us, as shown by a similar experience in Spain,” European Innovative Media Publishers said in a letter in October last year to lawmakers.
Google said the new EU laws would force it to choose which publishers it would license, effectively picking winners and losers.
Bigger publishers typically offer a broader range of popular content, so smaller competitors are likely to lose out.
Labubu, an elf-like plush toy with pointy ears and nine serrated teeth, has become a global sensation, worn by celebrities including Rihanna and Dua Lipa. These dolls are sold out in stores from Singapore to London; a human-sized version recently fetched a whopping US$150,000 at an auction in Beijing. With all the social media buzz, it is worth asking if we are witnessing the rise of a new-age collectible, or whether Labubu is a mere fad destined to fade. Investors certainly want to know. Pop Mart International Group Ltd, the Chinese manufacturer behind this trendy toy, has rallied 178 percent
My youngest son attends a university in Taipei. Throughout the past two years, whenever I have brought him his luggage or picked him up for the end of a semester or the start of a break, I have stayed at a hotel near his campus. In doing so, I have noticed a strange phenomenon: The hotel’s TV contained an unusual number of Chinese channels, filled with accents that would make a person feel as if they are in China. It is quite exhausting. A few days ago, while staying in the hotel, I found that of the 50 available TV channels,
There is no such thing as a “silicon shield.” This trope has gained traction in the world of Taiwanese news, likely with the best intentions. Anything that breaks the China-controlled narrative that Taiwan is doomed to be conquered is welcome, but after observing its rise in recent months, I now believe that the “silicon shield” is a myth — one that is ultimately working against Taiwan. The basic silicon shield idea is that the world, particularly the US, would rush to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion because they do not want Beijing to seize the nation’s vital and unique chip industry. However,
Life as we know it will probably not come to an end in Japan this weekend, but what if it does? That is the question consuming a disaster-prone country ahead of a widely spread prediction of disaster that one comic book suggests would occur tomorrow. The Future I Saw, a manga by Ryo Tatsuki about her purported ability to see the future in dreams, was first published in 1999. It would have faded into obscurity, but for the mention of a tsunami and the cover that read “Major disaster in March 2011.” Years later, when the most powerful earthquake ever
RSS