14 DAY TRIAL // Google News for Europeans could become a thing of the past if Google and the EU won't reach an agreement once the upcoming copyright legislation comes into effect.
The European Parliament is trying to legislate all matters of copyright inside the European Union, and the new Copyright Directive has some advantages for copyright holders, which, in theory, is a good thing.
Publishers are going to be able to get money from Alphabet, Facebook, and every other company that aggregates news. Google News, for example, display a small excerpt for each news articles, and under the new Directive, that is enough to trigger a copyright claim.
Companies would be able to get money from Google for this piece of text, and it’s safe to say that Google is not willing to pay publishers, especially since they claim they’re not making money off this service. It does, however, bring people the search engine.
Still unclear to the scope or impact of a retreat
When the European Union enforced its GDPR directive regarding processed personal data from the EU, over the Internet, quite a few companies decided to just drop the market instead of complying.
For now, the European Unions has yet to decide on how it’s going to deal with small excerpts and a decision is unlikely to arrive soon, which means that the status quo is still valid. It’s also quite like that Google is not willing to engage in yet another major battle with the EU, and maybe draw heavy fines.
According to a Bloomberg report, Romania, which is the current head of the European Council, is not going to make any decision soon. As you can imagine, such a wide-ranging decision is going to impact all of the states in the EU, so there is quite a bit if disagreement.
For now, it’s impossible to say how this dispute is going to end, but Google's threat of pulling out of the EU market seems to be part of negotiating strategy, more than anything else.