Google is facing a tax battle from the European Union with a reform plan that seeks to make news aggregators pay for the news story snippets they display. This means that if Google News wants to show us a snippet or preview of an online article from another site, they will need to pay up.
Understandably, Google is not happy about this proposal. But media giants like Newscorp say that taxes are the only hope to save the news industry that is currently starving for revenue. I guess this is to be expected from the dying mainstream media. In their desperate attempt to remain in existence as the internet takes over, along with alternative media, they are trying to scrape any revenue they can, even if that means getting the state to coerce money from internet aggregators that help get their stories out.
Anyone can go online, and get free news from the Internet without having to buy a newspaper or pay online news sites to get the information. This is bringing the newspaper industry to its knees. More and more people are unwilling to pay for online news services. They can just go to Google News or some other location that has news, like social media sites such as Facebook.
The European Union has been fighting with Google in the past, hitting Google with a €2.4 billion fine over unclear competition this past June. This new battle over taxing news snippets is going to play out for the rest of the year. The latest fine this past June was the biggest the EU has imposed for abuse of market power. Prior to 2017's €2.42 billion number, the biggest fine was for Intel at €1.06 billion in 2009.
The European Alliance of News Agencies says "unauthorised internet use of media content is threatening citizens' sustainable access to quality news content. It is therefore crucial that neighbouring rights be created for news agencies and other publishers, covering all activity".
It seems like they are saying that without the news agencies being paid for news snippets, then it will undermine the sustainable access to quality news. I guess for them, alternative media companies are not able to provide sustainable access or quality news?
What are "neighbouring rights"? This means that sites that do show news snippets or short quotes from copyrighted content, have an obligation to pay in order to share that "neighbors" content.
What this is about is making sure that companies, like newspapers, will maintain their hold on the information they provide, and only allow others to share that information if they are willing to pay for it. This new reform plan is one of many updates being done to European copyright laws that are being applied to the online domain.
The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) has already said these types of ideas are "ill-founded, controversial and detrimental to all players. It would hurt anyone who writes, reads or shares the news—including the many European startups working with the news sector to build sustainable business models online"
In order for the new "snippet tax" reform plan to pass, 65 of the EU bloc's population would need to support it, as member states are divided with no compromise in sight for this year. France, Spain and Germany support it, while the UK and Nordic countries opposite it. The plan is expected to be approved by EU's Legal Affairs Committee by October 10th.
Publishes want money for the content they release, and don't even want a snippet to go for free, even though that brings them traffic from new markets like Google News. I think if this does pass, Google should just not use the Eurpoean publishers snippets anymore, and see how much their traffic goes down. I suspect those publishers would soon be giving away access to their content.
Do you agree with publishers taxing for snippets of content?
Do you think Google should comply, or refuse?
Do you think Google will win-out if they drop the taxing EU publishers from Google News?
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
References:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/europe-mulls-tax-on-google-for-displaying-news-articles/articleshow/59839895.cms
https://phys.org/news/2017-07-europe-google-news-snippet-tax.html
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