LONDON: Google will pay publishers a billion dollars over the next three years for its content, the company’s latest effort to ease tensions over its dominance of the news industry.
The company said Thursday that it has signed agreements for its news partnership program with nearly 200 publications in Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
“This financial commitment, the largest to date, will pay publishers to create and select high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience,” said the CEO. Sundar pichai said in a blog post.
On Thursday, the Google News Showcase will launch in Brazil and Germany, with story panels that allow publishers to package stories with features like timelines. Will appear first in google news on Android, then Apple iOS, before it’s rolled out to Google Discover and Search.
Subscribed publications include Der Spiegel and Stern from Germany and Folha de S Paulo from Brazil.
Other features like video, audio, and daily briefings are also in the works. Pichai said Google is working to expand the program to other countries, namely India, Belgium and the Netherlands. He did not say whether the United States would be included.
The funding is based on a news licensing program launched by Google in June as it seeks to defuse tensions with the troubled news industry. News companies want Google, and its Silicon Valley rival Facebook, to pay for the news content they pull from commercial media while taking most of the advertising revenue.
However, skeptics remain.
The European Editors Council said it is an attempt by Google to avoid legislation and government action for them to negotiate.
“Many are quite cynical about Google’s perceived strategy,” said Angela Mills Wade, the council’s chief executive. “By launching a product, they can dictate terms and conditions, undermine legislation designed to create conditions for fair trading, while claiming that they are helping finance news production.”
Members of the council include German publisher Axel Springer and the British unit of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which have been fighting a year-long battle to get tech giants to pay for news that appears on their platforms.
Pressure on compensation has increased in several countries for Google and Facebook.
The Australian government is drafting a law for Facebook and Google to pay the country’s media companies for the news content they use in early October. Facebook has responded by threatening to block Australian news content instead of paying for it.
In France, Google has refused to show snippets of some stories as it fights against government demands for license fees for publishers, as required by a recent European Union directive.
Last year, Facebook unveiled its own plan to pay American news companies such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today for their headlines, reportedly millions of dollars in some cases. It also said in 2019 that it was investing $ 300 million over three years in news initiatives, with a focus on local news partnerships and third-party data verification.
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