Google adopts a hard line and refuses to pay the French news sites despite the new law

Google will pay nothing to French news agencies for the privilege of creating a link to their articles, announced Wednesday the research giant.

France is the first country to have implemented a European directive aimed at withdrawing funds from technology giants. The redrafting of copyright, approved by the European Parliament in March, requires EU countries to give press agencies stricter control over the use of extracts from their rights. items. But the law at the European level gave little detail, allowing each country to decide exactly what rights the press organizations would get.

Google believes that the French version of the law allows Google to include the title of an article in a search result, but not the "fragment" that often appears under the title. Thus, to comply with the new French law, Google will remove the fragment below links to French news sites, as well as thumbnail images that sometimes appear next to news results.

"We do not accept that anyone's payments are included in the search results," Google wrote in another blog article Wednesday. "We sell ads, not search results, and every ad on Google is clearly marked, and that's why we do not pay publishers when people click on their links in search results."

Of course, this change could reduce traffic on French news sites. Google says that if news sites want Google to display code snippets again, they just need to give Google permission.

This is not what the lawyers of the law had in mind. Their goal was not to make European news sites less present in search results, but to convince Google to start paying license fees. But Google says it's not the intention to do it.

This is not the first time that Google is playing hard on this issue. In 2014, Spain passed a route tax law to force Google and other major news aggregators to pay license fees to Spanish news sites. Google reacted by closing the Spanish version of Google News, which helped reduce traffic on Spanish news sites.

Other European countries must adopt their own version of the Copyright Directive in the coming months. The exact details of the legislation may vary from country to country. But Google sends a clear message: no matter what the national legislatures do, it does not intend to pay news publishers for links to their content.