Google will finally pay publishers for their content

Google announced it would pay publishers to reuse the snippets of their content. This comes just a few days after it tried to show how much money it brought in Australia, in order to avoid such payments.

In fact, the giant also tried to avoid paying French publishers for this. It said, at that time, it might do this by not displaying snippets of content in France.

Still, the French Competition Watchdog used an urgent procedure, last year. Thus, it proved that Google’s unilateral withdrawal of snippets would be an abuse, just to avoid payment.

Google, forced to pay publishers

Google hasn’t made the new decision because it wanted to. In fact, it comes as France transposed a EU copyright reform agreed two years ago. It appealed against it, but it lost and was ordered to negotiate with publishers and pay for their content.

Thus, Google’s VP product Management announced that the company signed a new global deal with Reuters for News Showcase. Previously, the giant signed agreements with almost 450 publications. According to the company, this would mean a one billion investment for the next three years.

Now, L’Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale also announced that it signed an agreement for about 300 general and political information press titles in France. Thus, it sets the terms of negotiation with its members for Google’s reuse of their content.

Will it happen in Australia, too?

Still, Google is trying to avoid the same kind of deals in Australia, where the regulators send a law project to the Federal Parliament. Recently, it played the $53 billion impact, just to avoid this. But regulators seem determined.

Moreover, the Australian Competition & Consumer made it clear that tech giants are just the first to see strict regulation. Still, Google blocked some Australian news websites’ results recently.

And publishers rely on the fact that both Google and Facebook make billions of dollars out of the ads they show, together with the content. That’s the money both platforms have to share with the owners of that content.

Still, Facebook, which should also pay for the content has not done anything to solve the problem, by now.

Anyway, things are changing very fast and giants seem to lose their absolute power.