Google won't pay anything to French news organizations for the privilege of linking to their articles, the search giant announced on Wednesday.
France is the first country to implement a Europe-wide directive intended to squeeze cash out of technology giants. The copyright overhaul, approved by the European Parliament in March, requires EU countries to give news organizations stricter control over the use of excerpts of their articles. But the European-level law was light on details, allowing individual countries to decide exactly what rights news organizations would get.
Google believes that France's version of the law allows Google to include an article's headline in a search result, but not the "snippet" that often appears below the headline. So to comply with the new French law, Google will remove the snippet below links to French news sites, as well as thumbnail images that sometimes appear next to news results.
"We don’t accept payment from anyone to be included in search results," Google wrote in another Wednesday blog post. "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."
Of course, the change could reduce traffic to French news sites. Google says that if news sites want Google to start showing snippets again, they just have to give Google permission to do so.
This isn't what advocates of the law had in mind. Their goal wasn't to make European news sites less prominent in search results—it was to convince Google to start paying licensing fees. But Google is signaling that it has no intention of doing that.
This isn't the first time Google has played hardball on this issue. In 2014, Spain passed "link tax" legislation intended to force Google and other large news aggregators to pay licensing fees to Spanish news sites. Google responded by shutting down the Spanish version of Google News, resulting in reduced traffic to Spanish news sites.
Other European countries are required to pass their own version of the copyright directive in the coming months. The exact details of the legislation may vary from country to country. But Google is sending a clear signal that no matter what national legislatures do, it has no intention of paying news publishers for linking to their content.
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