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FILE – The Google building seen in New York on February 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
Google announced Friday that it will test removing links to news sites from a small number of California users to assess the potential impact if the California Journalism Preservation Act passes.
Assembly Bill 886, also known as CJPA, would require Google to pay news publishers a fee for the use of news content on its platform. The bill passed the Legislature last year and is currently being considered by the state Senate Judiciary Committee.
In a blog post Friday morning, Google called the CJPA a “link tax” that would require Google to pay for “simply connecting Californians to news stories.” Google also claims that over the past two decades, it has “provided substantial support to help news publishers navigate and innovate in a changing digital landscape.”
No one should be fooled by this.
Google made more than $300 billion last year, much of it from ads it sold using content it didn’t create or pay for. In its early days, Google sent a lot of traffic to news publishers, but in recent years it hasn’t been as much, with Google trying to keep people on its sites where it makes money.
This is why Google’s revenue continues to increase while news publishers, not just print newspapers, can barely keep the lights on. In fact, data from SimilarWeb shows that more than half of Google searches for top news terms end without a link being clicked. In other words, more than half of the time, Google isn’t actually connecting anyone to real news sources.
Google seems to believe that news should be free, but those of us in the news industry are acutely aware that professional reporting is expensive, at least for Google. Let’s be clear: News is a business. As much as Google might hate to admit it, this is big business for Google. That’s why Google launched News first after search, and why News is the first tab next to All on the search results page.
That’s why Google is testing with some users in California what would happen if they removed news links from their sites. For the record, Google tested completely removing the News tab in February, but apparently didn’t like the results and said it wouldn’t remove the News tab for all users. Announced.
That may be because news is a big part of Google’s business.
According to a recent study, the legitimate payout from Google for the use of U.S. news content is between $10 billion and $12 billion annually.
Google clearly doesn’t want to pay for it.
At a Senate hearing in December, a Google representative said news publishers earn $2 billion a year in advertising revenue from traffic referred to them by Google. That begs the question of whether Google itself should actually be paying anything for the content it has built such a lucrative advertising business on.
Of course, Google’s clampdown on digital advertising comes after the U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of states allege that Google has a monopoly on digital advertising and uses its market dominance to steer advertisers to its own interests. The company is the subject of an antitrust lawsuit filed by the company. They squeeze publishers’ profits by manipulating prices, while operating their own services and sites.
Friday’s announcement that Google would suppress news for some Californians comes from the same strategy. Here, Google leverages its search command (according to Semlash, it controls 91.5% of the global search market) to bully publishers and the public alike by threatening to withhold news. I’m threatening you.
Don’t get me wrong. Content, especially news, is a cornerstone of Google’s business model, and Google’s criticism of laws that force it to pay for the material it uses is a blatant attempt to maintain its revenue streams through blackmail as well as media . But also ordinary people who want to connect with news online.
This type of anti-competitive behavior is why we need laws like the CJPA.
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