More And more publishers around the world are joining hands to fight search engine and apps giant Google, accusing it of “eating into their revenues”. Already, over 150 newspapers in Brazil have pulled out of Google while punishing legislation is underway in France and Germany.
In countries including Germany, publishers are pushing for ancillary copyright that will see Google pay for featured headlines and first lines while Google says this constitutes fair play.
This new push after a similar one years back when newspapers and other media in the united stated waged a similar war that the search company won. Large newspapers had come out protesting that Google was hurting them by generating a page of links to pieces that the papers had financed to create.
The French and German governments are seemingly leaning towards the publishers although Google has insisted that this will not dilute their stand which is they will only pay for the data they host.
However, with Google delivering over 4 billion clicks monthly a quarter of which are through Google News to media websites, Google remains largely unshaken.
“Whenever you are dealing with government, you want to be very clear about what you will do and will not do,” Said Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, adding that, “and we don’t want to pay for content that we do not host. We are very clear on that.”
The new upheaval by the publishers comes even as they see their American counterparts slowly dwindle with many seeing this tactics as a way by the content providers of reinforcing their businesses although to others this is a battle long lost.
With a number of Web users believing in unrestricted access information, the world is probably more on Google’s side despite the publishers having equally solid partners in government.
