Google agrees to pay French news sites to send them traffic

Enlarge / Google's corporate headquarters. (credit: Alex Tai | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

French news sites have prevailed in negotiations with Google over "neighboring rights," a new legal right granted by the 2019 EU Copyright Directive. An agreement between Google and the French news industry "establishes a framework within which Google will negotiate individual licensing agreements" with individual news organizations, according to Google. Under these deals, French news articles will be featured in a new Google product called News Showcase.

This isn't the outcome Google wanted. For years, European news organizations have tried to force Google to pay them for the privilege of indexing their articles, and for years Google flatly refused to do so. When Spain passed legislation to force Google to pay to link to Spanish News organizations in 2014, Google responded by shutting down Google News in Spain.

Google tried to use that same playbook in France after the passage of the EU copyright directive. France was the first country to transpose the EU directive into its own laws. In 2019, Google announced it was going to stop displaying "snippets" from French news articles in search results. Google believed that showing only news story headlines, not brief excerpts from articles, would bring it into compliance with the new law.

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