Google News Faces Challenges From Publishers Abroad

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The New York Times
Monday, November 05, 2012

Google News Faces Challenges From Publishers Abroad

By DAVID CARR

They say you should never take on people who spill ink by the barrel, but your odds are better when you traffic in terabytes of data. In the United States, Google and big media went at it for several years over Google News and Google won, taking its argument for a free and open Internet all the way to the bank.

It’s a little counterintuitive, but large newspapers believed that Google was hurting them by generating a page of links — with headlines and a short summary — to articles that the newspapers had paid to create. Publishers said that what was supposed to be an index of the news had become the news, and was a disincentive for people to click through to the source.

American publishers eventually decided that the only thing worse than being aggregated by Google News was not being aggregated at all, but the fight has been joined anew in other countries by publishers who argue that the giant American search company is picking their pockets every time it links to articles.

There’s a large boycott under way in Brazil, punishing legislation is gaining momentum in Germany, and there is talk of a similar effort in France.

You wouldn’t know it by speaking to Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman. He takes the challenges to Google News seriously — he just returned from talks with President François Hollande of France — but he sounded sanguine on a phone call from Chicago.

“We had some good discussions, and I would expect that we will reach some kind of agreement by the end of the year,” he said.

Don’t expect that agreement to acknowledge the principle of so-called ancillary copyright, which has been pushed in Germany and elsewhere. It suggests that Google and others should pay for featuring headlines and the first few lines of an article, while Google asserts that this constitutes fair use.

In France and Germany, publishers have found willing partners in their national governments as they try to put the squeeze on Google. It probably won’t work no matter who is doing the squeezing, because while the rhetoric from Google is always friendly, its position is always firm.

“Whenever you are dealing with government, you want to be very clear about what you will do and will not do,” Mr. Schmidt said. “And we don’t want to pay for content that we do not host. We are very clear on that.”

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.