For years now, large European newspaper publishers have dreamed of charging news aggregators such as Google News for the privilege of sending readers to the publishers’ online articles. In other words, they want the advertising benefit of all that traffic, plus money on the side.
The publishers managed to get politicians on their side in both Germany and Spain, winning laws that demand just that. And now the German head of digital-economy policy at the European Commission, G?nther Oettinger, is considering rolling out this “Google tax” on the wider EU stage.
Oettinger’s department published a consultation on Wednesday that covers this “neighboring rights” issue (more commonly referred to as “ancillary copyright”). The consultation will run until June 15.
The problem is, ancillary copyright proved to be a complete disaster in both Germany and Spain, failing to put a penny into the pockets of those press publishers — and in the Spanish case, causing losses of millions of euros.
The consultation (in English, German and French, but sadly not Spanish) asks whether those earlier attempts had “any impact” on consumers, authors, publishers and web firms. That’s a worthwhile question.
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Germany was the first to get an ancillary copyright law back in 2013, following intensive lobbying by politically connected players such as publishing giant Axel Springer. The law gave publishers the right to charge online news aggregators such as Google for reproducing snippets of their article text in search results.
However, when they tried to enforce this new right against Google, the giant simply stopped using those snippets. Referrals to Springer properties such as Bild plummeted by as much as 80% and the publishers quickly retreated, granting Google a temporary exemption from having to pay them.
The publishers then tried to take Google to the German competition authority, claiming it was using its dominance of the search market to strong-arm them into submission. The regulator decided Google was under no obligation to reproduce snippets of the publishers’ article text if it didn’t want to. Subsequent negotiations to decide a rate for the fees have come to nought.
In Spain, meanwhile, legislators came up with an even tougher version of the law that forced publishers to demand ancillary copyright fees from news aggregators, whether they wanted to or not (and smaller publishers, needing Google’s traffic, really did not want to). It was impossible for Spanish publishers to grant Google the exemption their German counterparts had granted.