Google Removes California News Links Amid Legislation Debate

TFD – Dive into the controversy as Google takes action against California news links due to legislative pressure. Understand the implications for news publishers and the digital landscape.

In response to state legislation that would force large digital corporations to compensate news outlets for their material, Google stated on Friday that it will be eliminating links to California news websites.

Alphabet subsidiary Google (GOOGL) stated that the change would only have a minor impact on Californians and is meant to be a “test,” enabling the business to assess “the impact of the legislation on our product experience.

The California Journalism Preservation Act was proposed in March 2023 and is currently pending a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee of the state. It would compel digital platforms, such as Google and Meta, to pay qualifying news outlets a “journalism usage fee” for the use of their content in conjunction with digital advertisements.

The law is being introduced at a time when more people are turning to social and online platforms instead of conventional media to find and consume news. Since news websites have raised concerns about platforms’ increasing power over what users see, the law was brought up out of concern that the corporations’ news aggregation tactics will drive readers away from them.

Co-author of the law and California State Senate President Pro-Tempore Mike McGuire referred to the action as a “abuse of power” and an act of “bullying” on Friday night.

He posted on X, the former home of Twitter, saying, “This is a dangerous threat by Google that not only sets a terrible precedent here in America, but puts public safety at risk for Californians who depend on the news to keep us informed of life-threatening emergencies and local public safety incidents.” “We demand that Google executives take responsibility for this stunt as it is a betrayal of public trust.”

Legislators and bill supporters contend that although small and local news publishers do not profit in the same way, tech giants do when they share their content.

Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, one of the bill’s co-authors, stated in a statement upon the legislation’s initial introduction in March 2023 that “these dominant digital ad companies are enriching their own platforms with local news content without adequately compensating the originators.” “They need to start paying market value for the journalism that local media outlets are allowing them to aggregate for free.”

Google is stifling California news, according to Charles F. Champion, president and CEO of the California News Publishers Association.

“Policymakers must act, and act now,” he wrote on X on Friday. “The fact that one company can shut down the means by which 90% of the public finds online content in order to achieve their own political and business ends shows just how much.” “Google shouldn’t be permitted to behave as though they are above the law; they are not.”

Chris Argentieri, the president and chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Times, said  a statement on Saturday that “Google’s threat to deny critical information to Californians as a response to proposed legislation… is outrageous.” “Google’s statement is an additional piece of evidence that demonstrates the merits of the Department of Justice’s investigation against the company and really supports the need for the law. Such abusive practices have a long history of being rejected in California, and I fully anticipate that this case will end similarly.

Google has opposed “link taxes” for a very long time.

“The uncapped financial exposure created by CJPA would be unworkable, as we’ve shared when other countries have considered similar proposals,” Google Vice President of Global News Partnerships Jaffer Zaidi stated in a blog post on Friday. “No company could tolerate the level of business uncertainty that the CJPA in its current form would create if it were to become law.”

In 2023, Alphabet recorded $307.4 billion in sales.

Google announced at the time that it will “remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News, and Discover products in Canada” in response to a similar bill that was passed in Canada in June 2023. The company provided an update in November stating that it was in the process of working with the Canadian government to “go through the exemption process” and that it would keep “sending valuable traffic to Canadian publishers” while the kinks were worked out.

In a statement on Saturday, Google informed that although it has completed its agreement with the Canadian government, it was still working through the exemption procedure. It is scheduled for enactment in June.

A 2021 Australian rule requiring platforms to pay Australian news outlets for using their content elicited a similar response from the corporation. A few months prior to the bill’s passage in January 2021, Google stated in an open letter that “we would have no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia if the Code were to become law in its current form.”

In the end, Google entered into “voluntary commercial agreements with a significant number of news media organizations,” as stated by the legislature’s creator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. At the time, Google announced that rather than paying publishers for connections, it would instead compensate them through its Google News Showcase.