Google will start paying license fees to French partners

On Thursday, the French authorities finally accomplished the impossible: to make Google agree to pay media outlets for the license fees they spent more than half a decade beg.

The decision came after “several months of negotiations” with the French competition authority ordered the tech giant began negotiating licensing fees with local news publishers in April last year. More specifically, the Competition Authority had a problem with Google’s mandate that required publishers based in the EU to offer the company free access to its content if they wanted their stories to be displayed on products like Google Search or Google News.

The rationale here, as Google Vice President Richard Gingras explained blog post at the time, was the company “[sells] ads, not search results. ”

“We don’t accept payments from anyone to be included in search results,” he continued. “It’s also why we don’t pay publishers when people click on their links in a search result.”

Regional publishers denounced fast enough, and no one was louder about it than the French. The country was the first and so far the only EU actor to adopted the European Union bill on “copyright reform” which was voted by the European Parliament in March 2019 before being officially implemented throughout France the following October.

Among a good number of others semi-controversial statutes, a sticking point for tech companies around the world was a new set of legal rights allowing publishers to tackle players like Facebook, Google and their ilk if they don’t offer “fair and proportionate compensation” for “Digital use” of their press assets.

This is the type of legal obligation that seems difficult to overcome, but Google has had a lot of practice lately. When the Spanish authorities adopted a similar set of anticompetitive copyright measures in 2012, Google chose to to close Google News for the whole country instead of complying. When Google largely avoided the German version of these mandates that the country put into practice in 2013, the major publishers quickly realized that boycotting Google’s adtech activity would take theirs down – and they’d better give up their content for free rather than wage this war. Years later, when a consortium of German publishers ended up suing Google for some of these – I’ll just say it – extortion tactics, German law enforcement officials alongside the company anyway.

And it doesn’t even touch the kerfuffle takes place in Australia right now on its own proposed copyright protection mandate, an idea Google is doing its best to pressure against. So you can sort of see why the choice of the company to finally give in to one of these major markets is a big change.

What the Google-France handshake will look like in practice is still being defined. In one blog post, Google said it would “negotiate individual license agreements” with a selection of sites that scored IPG certification with the French government for their work in publishing “political and general information”. As this term is a translation from the original French of the corporate blog, we reached out to Google to find out if the distinction is as absurdly wide as it appears in English.

Instead, the answer was sort of more confusing. A company spokesperson specified that the reputation of a site as a source of this type of information comes “from the human, material and financial investments made by publishers and press agencies, as well as the contribution of these actors “political and general information and the importance of the use of press publications. “

The regional authority that issues this certification – The Joint Committee for Publications and News Agencies (or simply CPPAP) defines an outlet in the political and general field of history as:

whose main objective is to provide, on a permanent and continuous basis, information, analyzes and comments on political and general local, national or international news likely to enlighten the judgment of citizens.

“This information must be of interest far beyond the concerns of a category of readers,” continues the CPPAP, adding that these sites must employ at least one “professional journalist” and must promise not to get involved in stories that distort the “Violent or pornographic. In other words, the General rules are simple enough that any reputable publisher won’t worry too much about getting the IPG Seal of Approval.

Google does not clarify these details in the blog, but it Is Note that its donation calculations will take into account specific numbers, such as the number of items a store produces per day and the monthly readership that those items end up collecting.

But in the end, the distinction between what is and what is not “general” or “political” history is always subjective. Gizmodo dot com, for example, puts fair share political history, but also houses dog blogs, carp blogs, and the occasional track about how weird it really is that conchs have eyes. Is this “general” enough for CPPAP – and Google, for that matter? How will Google distinguish between political journalism and political clickbait when distributing his dollars? How to do newsletters factor in this decision? Dear god, what about opinion columns?

As is the case with almost all major Google policy decisions, these types of machinations are left in some dark wave pit that the company will not disclose, and – if what we saw in Germany is still true today – ultimately knows that it is not obligated to do so. Somehow, even when publishers celebrate their own small wins against Google, they’re still trapped in a cycle where all they can do is lose.

Update at 4:21 p.m. ET: Added response from Google.