14 DAY TRIAL // Google has won a small battle over in Germany after regulators decided not to pursue an antitrust claim against the company. The complaint was pushed forward by VG Media, a consortium of publishers from Germany that has been at war with Google for some time now.
As you may remember, Google has been fighting with German publishers because they want Google to pay them royalties for using excerpts from their articles in Google News.
Following a 2013 law that seeks to impose a copyright tax on Google and any other news aggregators for displaying content from German newspapers and magazines in search results, the Internet giant has been trying to wiggle out of this. While Google could certainly benefit from being able to display said excerpts in their search results to the extent of having people find what they’re looking for in an easy manner, the publishers complaining about Google are actually the ones with the most to win.
It is already known that Google is one of the biggest referrals as it redirects visitors to millions of websites in the world, including the newspapers and magazines of these German publishers.
Ultimately, following some pushes from Google, a compromise was reached, allowing search engines and other news aggregators to display single words or very small text excerpts, a concept that has yet to be defined clearly.
A while back, Google decided to require German publishers to explicitly opt in to Google News or be excluded from the results as a way to avoid potential lawsuits. Much to no one’s surprise, all publishers signed up for this, partially wavering their copyright for the blocks of text indexed by Google and included in the News results.
The fact that the world’s biggest search engine asked German publishers to opt in to have their content featured in results pages didn’t sit well with them, which led to complaints that they were being coerced to follow Google’s rules. This, they said, was an abuse of market power.
According to Der Spiegel, the regulators in Germany didn’t agree with the publishers, however. Instead, they said that “sufficient suspicion” is always necessary to initiate an abuse procedure, but that VG Media didn’t manage to establish this.
The fact remains that while these publishers are trying to milk money from Google in the off-chance that their content could get copied and their copyright infringed, Google could easily just stop indexing their articles. In that scenario, they’re the ones who have a lot of traffic to lose and, therefore, ad money.