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LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) – Europe wants to help news publishers. The dominance of technology companies such as Google and Facebook means that its efforts will make little difference.
Silhouettes of mobile phone users and mobile devices in front of a Google logo screen projection. Illustration of the photo taken on March 28, 2018. REUTERS / Dado Ruvic
Legislators in the European Parliament could vote on Wednesday to create a copyright class for press groups. If adopted and then accepted by the European Commission and the Council, media companies may charge fees for search engines and social media sites that publish excerpts from their articles.
The idea is to use copyright law to give newspapers a share of advertising revenue from Google and Facebook. Film producers, record companies and broadcasters enjoy similar protections to the rights held by writers and musicians. Last year, nearly 80% of Spotify's revenue, $ 4.7 billion, went directly to vendors, including music labels. Cable TV groups are paying huge fees to carry American TV channels – according to a model media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, who could be copied between newsgroups and Facebook. The rules proposed by Europe could constitute a legal basis.
Except they probably would not. The news is much more trivialized than music, television and cinema. Spotify would be a haemorrhage for subscribers if a big label was making music, like a cable TV company without ESPN or Fox News. Google and Facebook, however, are important enough to ignore information publishers demanding fees.
The precedents are not encouraging. In Spain, the search engine removed Spanish publishers from its Google News service in 2014, after the country imposed copyright fees. A 2013 German law states that publishers must be paid when aggregators of information disseminate excerpts of articles. When Google refused to negotiate, the major news agencies waived these fees. They were afraid of being removed from the web searches, thus reducing the number of visitors to their sites.
In theory, rules at the European level could allow news groups to regroup and increase their bargaining power. But cooperation is a weak hope. Individual publishers would be incentivized to give up, waive fees and absorb more traffic than competing sites.
The root of the problem is that sites like Google and Facebook have overwhelming market power. This deserves to be addressed in antitrust legislation. France, for example, said in March that its competition authority could investigate the digital advertising market that the pair dominates. Copyright changes in Europe are unlikely to improve.
Breaks of sight
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