With Unyielding Focus, Big Tech Pulls The Ball Away From Publishers One More Time

Michael Hedges June 29, 2020 Follow on Twitter

The search engine remains a major innovation of digital transition. Before the mid-1990s, crawling, indexing and ranking information were functions limited to librarians with card boxes. The world is well beyond that now. Give thanks to all those tech scientists who invented the languages that grew bots.

Publishers, once with ink in their veins, paid little attention - and certainly no money - to search engines or anything else attached to the web until a decade later. The idea of people searching thousands of online sources for a word or subject was baffling. Who, they mused, would bother looking through all that stuff when all they really need is my newspaper? When the answer came back “everybody” publishers tried to stop all that nonsense. When search platforms starting to make piles of money by selling cheap ads publishers wanted war. It was too late. It’s still too late.

The headlines last week that Google, subsidiary of Alphabet, will “pay publishers for news articles,” as noted by UK Daily Telegraph (June 25), most probably sent news publishers into metaphysical rapture, or the wine cellar to drag out an expensive bottle for celebration. As the real world turned, the vague details from Google News product management VP Brad Bender were far less joyful. After all, just days earlier Australian publishers were demanding AUS$600 million. Google, Mr. Bender made clear, has no intention of paying that kind of money or anything close to it to anybody.

Following a scoop from the incomparable Axios media reporter Sara Fischer (June 25), Mr. Bender issued a blog post confirmation. A licensing program “for high-quality content” will pay “select” publishers for distribution on a new Google News product arriving later this year. Licensing agreements with publishers in Australia, Brazil and Germany have been settled. Also in the mix is a feature that compensates publishers for allowing readers to skip over paywalls.

"We've heard loud and clear that we need to do more to support publications around world,” said Mr. Bender’s statement. “Today's news is part of that solution.” Picture that famous Peanuts cartoon with Charlie Brown spinning through the air after Lucy yanks away the football. “Aaugh!”

Google executives have steadfastly resisted direct compensation to publishers for content. Paying for descriptive snippets in search results is, still, a non-starter. The company has invested a few hundred million through the Google News Initiative, which instructs publishers on tech solutions to improve customer targeting and, of course, sell ads. Publishers have little interest in self-improvement. They don’t like hawking advertising or subscriptions. They just want the cash, and lots of it. Almost a decade ago, Google fired up the OnePass subscription payment system. It lasted just over a year.

Publisher support groups have focused their attention on lobbying governments to force Google into submission. “We don’t yet know how comprehensive this licensing scheme will be, on what basis payments will be calculated, and whether or not it will be open to all news publishers, large or small, who wish to licence their content,” said European Publisher’s Council (EPC) executive director Angela Mills Wade in a statement (June 26). “It is important to recognise that it should be the norm that dominant platforms agree terms and pay for the content which they curate and profit from; the current state of play, whereby no licences are concluded with Google, is an unacceptable exception.”

“This announcement is vague and confusing and seems as much designed to maximize their position in ultimate negotiations with publishers,” said, astutely, US publisher support group News Media Alliance president David Chavern, quoted by Forbes (June 26). “It is a step in the right direction, but only a quite small one.” US publishers also went after snippets on Google search results but that was shot down as violating fair use provisions in US copyright law. More recently, News Media Alliance pushed for a US Department of Justice anti-trust investigation into Google but with US presidential elections in full swing the likelihood of that bearing fruit in the next year or two is next to nil.

What is likely, eventually, is a global rights agreement similar to music performance licensing. It is highly unlikely that Google - or search aggregators generally - would agree to anything less than universal licensing. Payments, perhaps per click, would be on the order of royalty payments radio stations pay for music; tiny and aggregated with all search platforms. Paywalls, very bad for the Google brand, could come to an end.

See also...

• Hot Topics - Google Alphabet YouTube

• Hot Topics - Copyright Law

• Hot Topics - Digital Transitions

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