By Ethan Baron | (San Jose) Mercury News
By Adam Beam | The Associated Press
Google has thrown down the gauntlet in its battle with California lawmakers and news publishers over compensation for content.
The Mountain View search and advertising giant said it will stop showing links to news stories produced by California media outlets as it fights a state bill that would make the company and others pay fees to news publishers for content they link to on their platforms.
Google announced the move in a blog post on Friday, calling it a “short-term test for a small percentage of users … to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience.” The company said it also would pause new investments in the California news industry, including the partnership initiative with news organizations and its product licensing program.
“By helping people find news stories, we help publishers of all sizes grow their audiences at no cost to them. (This bill) would up-end that model,” Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s vice president for global news partnerships, wrote in the post.
The move this week is a hard pivot from what a Google executive said on the issue just four months ago.
“We have no desire, we have no desire to stop including news in search,” Richard Gingras, Google’s vice president of News, said at a December hearing at UCLA.
Editorial: News is a big part of Google’s business, so why are they removing links to news sites?
Google refused to say Friday whether all California news outlets would be affected, or to answer other questions, including when links would be removed.
Guilds representing journalists from newsrooms across California condemned the tactic.
“California lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom must stand united against Google’s undemocratic threats to censor the work of California’s journalists by shutting off news access in the middle of an election year,” guild representatives said in a statement.
Antitrust crusaders agreed.
“They have retaliated, harassed and used their power to subjugate democratic processes that are aimed at securing the future of an essential democratic institution,” said Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute, an antitrust think tank. “There’s a lot of value that is created by news that is not returned to news.”
The California Legislature is considering a bill called California Journalism Preservation Act (AB 886) that would require tech giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft to pay a certain percentage of advertising revenue to media companies for linking to their content. How much the companies would have to pay would be decided by a panel of three judges through an arbitration process.
The bill aims to stop the loss of journalism jobs, which have been disappearing rapidly as legacy media companies have struggled to profit in the digital age. More than 2,500 newspapers have closed in the U.S. since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. California has lost more than 100 news organizations in the past decade, according to Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, the bill’s author.
“This is a bill about basic fairness — it’s about ensuring that platforms pay for the content they repurpose,” Wicks said. “We are committed to continuing negotiations with Google and all other stakeholders to secure a brighter future for California journalists and ensure that the lights of democracy stay on.”
The state Assembly passed the bill last year with bipartisan support, despite fierce opposition and lobbying efforts from big tech companies. The California Senate would have to pass it later this year for it to become law.
Supporters said the legislation would help level the playing field between news publishers and large digital platforms and provide a “lifeline” to local news organizations, which rely heavily on Google’s search engine to distribute its content in the digital era. While Google’s search engine has become the hub of a digital advertisement empire that generates more than $200 billion annually, news publishers saw their advertising revenues nosedive significantly in the last few decades.
But opponents, including Google, Meta and some independent newsrooms, call the legislation a “link tax” that would primarily benefit out-of-state newspaper chains and hedge funds and further decimate local news organizations.
Gingras at that hearing in December said Google already made significant contributions to support local journalism, pointing to the tech giant’s financial grants and training to nearly 1,000 local publications in 2023, among other programs.
Google’s search engine should be seen as “the largest newsstand on Earth,” Gingras said, where it helps connect users to news websites more than 24 billion times per month. Google’s search engine holds an estimated 90% share of the market.
“This traffic in turn helps publishers make money by showing ads or attracting new subscribers,” he said, adding that it’s estimated that each click on a link from Google is worth 5 cents to 7 cents to a news website.
Google’s decision to temporarily remove links to news websites is not a new tactic for tech giants to use when pushing back on unwanted legislation. When Canada and Australia passed similar laws to promote journalism, Meta — the company that owns Facebook and Instagram — responded by blocking content from Canadian publishers on its sites in Canada. The company made similar threats to U.S. Congress and California lawmakers last year. Google had threatened to do the same in Canada. But in November, Google agreed to pay 100 million Canadian dollars ($74 million U.S. dollars) to the news industry.
News publishers would suffer and could lay off more journalists if Google completely blocks content from its search, but experts say Google also would take a financial hit without news content.
“Google would be damaging itself enormously if it decided to stop using newspaper content,” Brandon Kressin, an antitrust attorney representing News Media Alliance and other news publishers, told lawmakers in a December hearing. “They would be cutting off their nose to spite their own face.”
