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60M Euro Smooths Relations Between Google and French Publishers

Posted by timothy on from the throwing-money-at-the-problem dept.

New submitter Flozzin writes with news of some resolution to the long-standing dispute that some French publishers have had with Google for republishing snippets of news reports without sharing revenue earned from the ads run alongside. Now, reports the BBC, "Google has agreed to create a 60m euro ($82m; £52m) fund to help French media organisations improve their internet operations. It follows two months of negotiations after local news sites had demanded payment for the privilege of letting the search giant display their links. The French government had threatened to tax the revenue Google made from posting ads alongside the results."

3 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Get it right by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google is not paying for the "privilege" of showing links to newspapers on its search engine. They are paying because they created Google News which uses snippets of those stories to create a valuable news web site that brings in significant advertising revenue and traffic to other Google services.

    The newspapers argument is that they built a news site for free using other people's content. If you go to the Google search page it doesn't tell you the news, you have to know it already in order to search for it. Google News gives you what the newspapers consider valuable information for free, using their content as a source. Additionally they are claiming that the click-through rates are very low because the multiple headlines and snippets often give people as much information as they want.

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    1. Re:Get it right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      No they don't. This is Google News:
      https://news.google.com/
      That's not giving away the content, in any case. Each teaser is shorter than a slashdot summary.

      And you don't already have to know the news to search for it, you just go to news.google.com

      Seriously, how can someone be so anxious to post bogus info as if they're "clarifying"?

  2. Face-saving trifle by ConfusedVorlon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems to me that the newspapers didn't have a leg to stand on, and Google gave them a face-saving concession to let everyone walk away with their heads held high.

    Google doesn't really care about the $60m, it's a fairly small sum, doesn't set a terrible precedent, and saves them the time and effort of fighting this battle.

    Meanwhile, the government has achieved a concession and can walk away without an embarrassing loss of face.

    Finally, the newspapers can opt out of google news using their robots.txt if they want to (as they always could).

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