Google announced on Friday that it would remove links to Californian news sites in the search results of certain residents of the American state, to retaliate against a bill that would force it to pay a commission to the media.
“Let’s be clear: we believe that the CJPA (California Journalism Preservation Act, editor’s note) harms information in California,” asserts Jaffer Zaidi, a vice-president of the technology group, in a press release.
The CJPA was passed by the California Assembly in June 2023, and is currently being considered by the Senate.
The law would force the most powerful digital platforms, such as the Google search engine or large social networks like Facebook and Instagram (Meta), to pay the media in exchange for content shared with them.
Concretely, the tech giants should pay them a percentage of the advertising revenue generated by journalistic content.
This bill “would create a ‘link tax’ that would force Google to pay to simply connect Californians to news articles,” says Jaffer Zaidi, adding that it is a “misguided approach to supporting journalism”.
He assures that Google would no longer be able to provide this same service if the CJPA came into force.
The test launched Friday, which consists of removing links to Californian news sites “for a small percentage of users” in the state, should make it possible to “measure the impact of the legislation on the experience of our product “.
Google and Meta have lost similar battles in other countries.
In 2021, Facebook briefly blocked press articles on its site in Australia after the passage of a similar law, before the company and Google agreed to enter into agreements with press publishers and pay them.
In France, an agreement was concluded in 2022 between Google, publishers and press agencies to allow information content displayed in the search engine results and on other services to be subject to remuneration .
And in November, after months of negotiations, Canada and Google signed an agreement providing for the world’s number one online advertising company to pay $100 million a year to Canadian media companies in compensation for lost revenue. advertising.
“If enacted in its current form, the CJPA would create a level of business uncertainty that no business could accept,” Jaffer Zaidi said Friday.
