Google stops news snippets in Search in France after EU copyright law is introduced

In France, Google stops showing snippets of news stories in the search results of its own search engine. Google is doing this because France will transpose the adopted EU Copyright Directive into French law in October, bringing a new right for publishers into effect.

On the French Google blog, the company says that it will no longer display an overview of the news content of European press publishers in France, unless the individual publishers make agreements about this with Google stating that the publication of the snippets is desirable or what else. has to happen. This will be the case with the search results of all Google services. Sometimes Google shows a headline that links directly to the relevant news site, but sometimes there is also a small image and a short preview of the message, or a snippet. These three forms will disappear in France at Google, but because the EU directive is being transposed into national law in all EU countries, this seems to be a harbinger of what will happen in other Member States. France is the first country to transpose the EU directive into its own national law.

This involves citing articles from news publishers in search results and in Google News. An article about this has been included in the EU Copyright Directive, which deals with the protection of press publications with regard to online use. This gives the publishers a new exclusive right that comes on top of existing copyrights. On the basis of that right, publishers can protect their efforts, such as publishing documents. Third parties may only use press publications or parts thereof after they have obtained a license for it. With this, the publishers hope they gain more power and can make companies like Google pay more, although there is also criticism that this right, known as the ‘link tax’, will put pressure on freedom of expression and access to information. . Incidentally, hyperlinks and very short fragments do not fall under the new law, but it does not seem very likely that Google will fall back on them.

Richard Gingras, the vice president of Google’s news division, has reiterated in France following this move that his company will not pay press publishers to show their content. According to Gingras, people should have faith in Google’s search results, which in his view means that the search results should be based on relevance and not on commercial partnerships. Incidentally, Gingras warned in November last year that the Google News service might be closed in the EU if the ‘link tax’ were to continue. This has now become law in the form of Article 15 of the EU directive, but Gingras has not yet said anything about possible further consequences for the News service for the entire EU.

Part of the criticism of the EU Copyright Directive, and specifically the criticism of this new right for publishers, is partly due to the fact that similar situations have already occurred in the past. For example, Spain wanted Google to pay for indexing articles in 2014, after which Google decided within a month to pull the plug from the news service in Spain. Spanish publishers were not happy about that, because Google News was too dominant. In Germany, in 2014, attempts were also made to limit Google’s power. About 200 publishers decided to ban Google from citing their articles in search results and in Google News. This promotion ended within two weeks as traffic to the articles fell by 40 percent from the search engine and by 60 percent from Google News. German publishers soon decided to give Google their content for free, as traffic to their own publications and websites plummeted.