14 DAY TRIAL // One interesting piece of news that's been making the rounds of tech blogs and has now reached the more mainstream publications is Google's decision to stop hosting AP content on Google News. People noticed that, as early as December 24, new AP stories, which show up on Google News through a licensing agreement, were conspicuously missing. Google has admitted that it is indeed not adding any new content but remained mum about the reason.
"We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today. At the moment we’re not adding new hosted content from the AP," Google told Search Engine Land in a statement, but would not add any other details.
Lacking an official explanation, people naturally started speculating as to why Google would pull such a move. Two main reasons emerged and it seems that the most likely is the more practical, and boring, one. One scenario is that Google pulled the content as a retaliation in the Google versus news publishers war. This would serve as warning of sorts that it can live without the AP content and that it's the news syndication service that would be the most affected.
The AP, despite having a paid license agreement with Google, continued to accuse the company of stealing its content along with other old-school news publishers, notably News Corp.
The most likely explanation though is a bit more practical, Google's agreement with the AP is set to expire soon. Under the agreement, the stories are hosted by Google for just 30 days, after which they are pulled. It could be that Google wants to take advantage of the full 30 days, it presumably pays for, so it stopped posting stories which would go past the end the agreement, as TechDirt points out. It should be interesting to see how it all works out as it's unlikely that this will be the end of the story.