The Internet giant would rather modify the way its news results display in France than pay for displaying snippets
Google is changing the way it displays news in France as a result of a new law in the country that enforces a European Union-wide law.
In July, France became the first country to adopt the union’s copyright directive, which was approved by the EU’s parliament in March, with a new law that comes into effect on October. The directive’s Article 15 allows news organisations to require platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay to display their content online.
Google will begin showing only headlines for news and search results in France that come from news organisations. The Internet giant believes that the new French law allows for the free publication of headlines, which is why it is opting to remove the snippets that used to accompany these search results.
On Wednesday, Richard Gringas, Google VP for news, said that people trust it to help in finding useful and authoritative information from a diverse range of sources.
“To uphold that trust, search results must be determined by relevance—not by commercial partnerships,” he said. That’s why we don’t accept payment from anyone to be included in search results. We sell ads, not search results, and every ad on Google is clearly marked. That’s also why we don’t pay publishers when people click on their links in a search result.”
He said that to operate in the way the EU law suggests would reduce user choice and relevance and would ultimately result in users loosing trust in Google.
Google said, however, that publishers, including those in France, can use new, more granular webmaster settings to customise what can be displayed by Google Search or Google News.
In the past, Google had shut down its Spanish version of Google News after the country passed legislation that forced aggregators to pay licensing fees to Spanish news sites to link those sites’ content.
With other EU countries required in the coming months to pass national legislation to enforce the EU copyright directive, observers say that Google is making it clear it will not pay news publishers to link to their content or display snippets from news stories that appear on Google News or Google Search.
