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MEDIA

Google boss meets Hollande amid media row

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt was to meet French President François Hollande on Monday amid a revenue row with French, German and Italian media firms who want the Internet giant to pay for content.

Google boss meets Hollande amid media row
Photo: Guillaume Paumier. Montage: The Local

Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt was to meet French President François Hollande on Monday amid a revenue row with French, German and Italian media firms who want the Internet giant to pay for content.

Google, which receives four billion hits worldwide every month, has warned it will exclude French media sites from its search results if France adopts a bill that forces search engines to pay for linking to its news sites.

Italian and German firms have also joined the demand that the search engine should share some of the advertising revenue from user searches for news in media websites.

France's Communication and Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti on Monday adopted a combative tone ahead of the meeting.

"This European drive will not allow us to be penniless," she said on France Inter radio. "We must not think that all the fights against Internet giants are a lost cause."

Filippetti, who is also due to meet Schmidt, said it "was only normal that big search engines contribute to finance the press."

A letter sent by Google to several French ministerial offices this month said it "cannot accept" such a move and the company "as a consequence would be required to no longer reference French sites," according to a copy obtained by AFP.

Google said a law would "threaten (Google's) very existence".   

Leading French newspaper publishers last month called on the government to adopt legislation imposing a settlement in the long-running dispute with Google, forcing it and other search engines to share some of the advertising revenue.

Their demand follows the German government approving in August draft legislation that would force search engines to pay commissions to German media websites.

But it has not been adopted due to opposition from leftist parties in parliament.

Olivier Esper, a director at Google France, has warned that such a move will "be harmful both for the Internet and its users.

According to France's Le Figaro newspaper, Hollande appears favourable to forcing the Internet giant to pay for linking to newspapers.

Filippetti told a parliamentary commission last week that she backed the idea, calling it "a tool that seems important to me to develop".

She said she was surprised by the tone of Google's letter, telling AFP that "you don't deal with a democratically-elected government with threats."

French technology minister Fleur Pellerin meanwhile told the US niche website Quartz that if Google reached an agreement with Paris, legislation would not be necessary.

"We don't want to appear as a country that is anti-Google," Pellerin told Quartz.

"Obviously Google is a wonderful tool and Google is a major actor of the digital ecosystem. What I would suggest – and what I'm going to suggest to Google and to the press – is to start negotiating, to start discussions for maybe three months, and try to find an agreement on a negotiated basis. And if they don't, well we'll see."

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BUSINESS

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat

Google announced Wednesday the reopening of its news service in Spain next year after the country amended a law that imposed fees on aggregators such as the US tech giant for using publishers’ content.

Google News to return to Spain after seven-year spat
Google argues its news site drives readers to Spanish newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue.Photo: Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD / AFP

The service closed in Spain in December 2014 after legislation passed requiring web platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay publishers to reproduce content from other websites, including links to their articles that describe a story’s content.

But on Tuesday the Spanish government approved a European Union copyright law that allows third-party online news platforms to negotiate directly with content providers regarding fees.

This means Google no longer has to pay a fee to Spain’s entire media industry and can instead negotiate fees with individual publishers.

Writing in a company blog post on Wednesday, Google Spain country manager Fuencisla Clemares welcomed the government move and announced that as a result “Google News will soon be available once again in Spain”.

“The new copyright law allows Spanish media outlets — big and small — to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to make money with that content,” she added.

“Over the coming months, we will be working with publishers to reach agreements which cover their rights under the new law.”

News outlets struggling with dwindling print subscriptions have long seethed at the failure of Google particularly to pay them a cut of the millions it makes from ads displayed alongside news stories.

Google argues its news site drives readers to newspaper and magazine websites and thus helps them generate advertising revenue and find new subscribers.

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