Google to Strip Down French News Results Under New Rules

(Bloomberg) -- Google will show stripped-down French news search results from next month following a long unsuccessful battle to shape copyright rules.

“If you are in France, you may see that some results look different” without a preview or snippet of the article and a small image that can help users to decide whether to click directly to a publishers’ site, Google said in blog posting on Wednesday. Google will only show French users a snippet or an image from a European publisher with explicit consent.

Google’s rocky relationships with publishers have led to legal action, long European Union antitrust investigations and a EU copyright directive that allows news publishers seek licenses and payment from Internet sites that display their articles. Publishers argue that they are unfairly losing ad revenue to Google because it shows their content without payment. France is the first country to implement the new copyright rules by making legal changes next month.

Google said earlier this year it might pull its Google News service from Europe if publishers were required to demand money for the use of snippets. It withdrew Google News from Spain in 2014 after a law forced publishers to charge for content aggregated on other websites.

The final EU rules approved earlier this year allows publishers to waive their rights and let Google use their content free of charge.

News publishers in Europe get more than 8 billion visits from Google every month, or more than 3,000 visits every second. The referrals can help publishers to increase revenue from advertising or subscriptions, Google says, citing Deloitte estimates that each click from Google could be worth between 4 and 6 euro cents in potential revenue.

To contact the reporter on this story: Aoife White in Brussels at awhite62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Christopher Elser, Giles Turner

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