Google has thrown down the gauntlet in its battle with California lawmakers and news publishers over compensation for content.
The Mountain View internet-search and digital-advertising giant will stop showing links to news stories produced by California media outlets, as it fights a state bill that would make the company and others pay fees to news publishers for content they link to on their platforms.
Google announced the move in a blog post Friday, calling it a “short-term test for a small percentage of users … to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience.” The company said it also would pause new investments in the California news industry, including the partnership initiative with news organizations and its product licensing program.
“By helping people find news stories, we help publishers of all sizes grow their audiences at no cost to them. (This bill) would up-end that model,” Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s vice president for global news partnerships, wrote in the post.
That could mean in the near future, if you searched for this story on Google, it might not show up in the results.
The move this week is a hard pivot from what a Google executive said just four months ago.
“We have no desire, we have no desire to stop including news in search,” Richard Gingras, Google’s vice president of News, said at a December hearing on the issue at UCLA.
Google on Friday refused to say whether all California news outlets would be affected, or to answer other questions, including when links would be removed. As of Friday afternoon, links to publications including the Mercury News and the Sacramento Bee still showed up in search results.
Guilds representing journalists from newsrooms across California, including the Mercury News and East Bay Times, condemned the tactic.
“California lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom must stand united against Google’s undemocratic threats to censor the work of California’s journalists by shutting off news access in the middle of an election year,” guild representatives said in a statement.
Antitrust crusaders agreed.
“They have retaliated, harassed and used their power to subjugate democratic processes that are aimed at securing the future of an essential democratic institution,” said Courtney Radsch, director of the Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute, an antitrust think tank. “There’s a lot of value that is created by news that is not returned to news.”
The bipartisan California Journalism Preservation Act (AB 886) aims to boost the finances of traditional news outlets that have struggled even as their content has helped digital-advertising titans attract users to their platforms. The bill passed the state assembly but stalled in the California Senate in July under heavy lobbying from big tech companies. (The Bay Area News Group belongs to the California News Publishers Association, which is sponsoring the bill.)
Google and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, have been battling similar efforts around the world.
“As we’ve shared when other countries have considered similar proposals, the uncapped financial exposure created by (the Act) would be unworkable (and) in its current form would create a level of business uncertainty that no company could accept,” Google said in the blog post.
In Canada, under threat of a similar law, Google agreed in November to pay $73.5 million a year to news organizations for their content. Australia was the first country to pass a law forcing major tech companies to pay news companies for content.
The bill aims to stop the loss of journalism jobs, which have been disappearing rapidly as legacy media companies have struggled to profit in the digital age. More than 2,500 newspapers have closed in the U.S. since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. California has lost more than 100 news organizations in the past decade, according to Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, the bill’s author.
“This is a bill about basic fairness — it’s about ensuring that platforms pay for the content they repurpose,” Wicks said. “We are committed to continuing negotiations with Google and all other stakeholders to secure a brighter future for California journalists and ensure that the lights of democracy stay on.”
Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Houston released a paper in November that estimated Google’s annual advertising revenue from Search was well over $50 billion, and that revenue linked to news media search results amounted to $21 billion a year.
But opponents, including Google, Meta and some independent newsrooms, call the legislation a “link tax” that would primarily benefit out-of-state newspaper chains and hedge funds and further decimate local news organizations.
Gingras at that hearing in December said Google already made significant contributions to support local journalism, pointing to the tech giant’s financial grants and training to nearly 1,000 local publications in 2023, among other programs.
Google’s search engine should be seen as “the largest newsstand on Earth,” he said, where it helps connect users to news websites more than 24 billion times per month. Google’s search engine holds an estimated 90% share of the market.
“This traffic in turn helps publishers make money by showing ads or attracting new subscribers,” he said, adding that it’s estimated that each click on a link from Google is worth 5 cents to 7 cents to a news website.
News publishers would suffer and could lay off more journalists if Google completely blocks content from its search, but experts say Google also would take a financial hit without news content.
“Google would be damaging itself enormously if it decided to stop using newspaper content,” Brandon Kressin, an antitrust attorney representing News Media Alliance and other news publishers, told lawmakers in a December hearing. “They would be cutting off their nose to spite their own face.”
