What happened to Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto?
That corporate adage is clearly gone, and the internet giant has decided to show its supervillain side. The most recent example is the campaign in California, where the state legislature dared to pass a law requiring tech companies like Google to share advertising revenue with the journalists who produce much of the content. , demonstrating how easily the company can crush news organizations. platform.
Google announced the following last week: remove link The search results take you to a California news website. The company described the move as a “test” to prepare for possible consequences if the California Journalism Protection Act were passed. The company did not disclose the duration or scope of the test.
We are not being fooled, and neither should anyone else who cares about the survival of independent news reporting.
The California Journalism Preservation Act is supported by the California News Publishers Association. and the News/Media Alliance, of which The Times is a member.
Google’s announcement was clearly intended to intimidate news organizations and state legislators into resigning if they don’t. Specifically, Google could lock news organizations out of the world’s major search engines, making their content harder to find and potentially endangering their survival. It was also a show of force to let lawmakers know that attempts to regulate Google will not be tolerated.
Google is certainly not the first company to take a hard line in politics or business. But this is more than just lobbying legislators. Google has nearly 90% of the market in online search, and that’s how people find news. Removing local news outlets from search results means Californians will no longer be able to find important information about what’s happening in their communities and government. This undermines a democracy that relies on an informed public.
Given the power of Google and other major technology platforms, why would news organizations take on this fight? Because the status quo is unsustainable. Learn how most news organizations fund their reporting, and pressure Google, Meta, and other major platforms to share ad revenue with the companies and people who produce news content It is important to understand why there is a national and global effort to
News organizations rely on advertising revenue. When a user clicks a link to view an article on a news website, the news site receives a portion of the revenue from the advertisements that appear next to the article. Google claims that linking to articles supports news operations and drives traffic to news websites. it’s true.But it and other platforms increasingly Submit a snippet of facts from your story It can respond to searches and populate social media feeds so people don’t have to click through to your news website. This means that the company paying for the production of that news story won’t get any advertising revenue associated with it.
Google, in particular, relies on news content for its search results. Search for “Shohei Otani” or “earthquake” to see how many results come from news organizations. That’s a lot. But while news organizations, their reporters, editors, and photographers produce those stories, they are not compensated for the use of their work. This is the main reason why so many newspapers, magazines and other news operations have been forced to lay off staff or close down in recent years.
California Journalism Preservation Act Major platforms will require news organizations to compensate them for the use of their content. The bill by Rep. Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) is inspired by similar laws passed in Australia and Canada. This would establish the right for news companies to receive “journalistic royalties” for their content, which would be set through an arbitration process. The bill requires news companies to spend at least 70% of their income on reporters and news staff.
Wicks introduced the bill last year, but it was delayed to give lawmakers, news organizations and technology companies more time to work on the details. Concerns remain, including that such a law could benefit major out-of-state news organizations at the expense of small local news operations. These are issues that need to be resolved, but they should not stop negotiations and good faith efforts to find a workable compromise before the first state Senate hearing in June.
That’s why Google’s decision to close its California store now is so jarring that it may have backfired. Lawmakers don’t like to be bullied.Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire blew up the companycalled the move “a clear abuse of power and a display of extraordinary arrogance.”
In fact, Google’s power flex shows how much control this one company has over access to information. If lawmakers weren’t worried about that before, they should be now.
