Google Removes News Snippets From Complaining Publications In Germany; Publications Claim It's 'Blackmail'

from the let's-see-how-that-goes dept

"Google is discriminating in that they do not show snippets and thumbnails for publishers that made a claim, but they still show snippets and thumbnails from other publishers," he said. "They're trying to [apply] economic pressure."

The spokesman said VG Media was still in talks with the regulator about the case, and would add a complaint about this latest move. But how does this move harm consumers? I asked him. “Because they won’t have quality content in the future” if Google doesn’t pay for the snippets it uses, he claimed.



But surely Google actually helps publishers by sending traffic their way — do the publishers really believe that anyone sees a sentence-or-two-long snippet in Google News and then goes “Eh, that’s enough, I don’t need to click through”?

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Earlier this year, we noted a somewhat ridiculous and cynical attempt by some German newspapers to demand payment from Google for sending them traffic via Google News -- and not just a little bit, but 11% of gross worldwide revenue onsearch that showed one of their snippets. There were a few issues that we noted here: first, anyone not wanting to appear in Google News can quite easily opt-out. Second, Google News in Germany. Third, those very same newspapers were using Google's own tools to appear higher in search, suggesting that they certainly believed they were getting value out of being in Google's index.While German regulators rejected this request from the news publication industry group VG Media, Google has now decided to remove all news snippets from VG Media publications . It will still display results from those publications, but only in pure link/title format. Google claims it's doing this to "remove [the] legal risks" from ongoing legal action from VG Media, but it seems equally likely that this will also decrease the traffic to those publishers' websites.As we've discussed in the past, years back under similar circumstances in Belgium, Google simply removed the complaining publications from its index, only to have those publications freak out and beg to be let back in, exposing the hypocrisy of those publishers, insisting that what Google was doing was somehow unfair.Indeed, almost immediately, VG Media shot back that this is a form of "blackmail." According to David Meyer at GigaOm:So... showing the snippets without payment is unfair and infringing. And,showing the snippets is unfair and blackmail. Someone want to explain how any of this makes any sensethan that it's just petty corporate jealousy that Google has made a lot of money and those publishers want some of it for nothing?VG Media's spokesperson seems to honestly think that there's some sort of moral requirement for Google to both pay for and show snippets. Again from Meyer:It's difficult to see how this is anything other than "We failed to develop our own business model, so the company that did ought to just give us money."

Filed Under: blackmail, copyright, germany, google news, search, snippets

Companies: google, vg media