New details emerge about Google’s payments to link to French news sites

Enlarge / Google's main headquarters. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Google will pay $76 million over three years to 121 French news organizations to comply with a new French law requiring Google to pay when it uses "snippets" from news articles, Reuters reports. The payments range from $1.3 million paid to Le Monde to $13,741 for a local weekly newspaper called La Voix de la Haute Marne.

Reuters notes that "leading national dailies Le Monde, Le Figaro and Liberation and their respective groups negotiated about 3 million ($3.6 million) each per year on top of this, notably by agreeing in November to sell subscriptions through Google."

French law gave Google few options

These payments are the result of a shotgun marriage brokered by the French government. Until recently, Google insisted that it wouldn't pay a penny to link to news articles in France or elsewhere. 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.

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