This would appear familiar to anyone who has followed Google News’ relations with news publishers over the years. Now, the next country in line where the tension has erupted is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. But can Google be able to keep publishers pleasing enough to exploit opportunities in the escalating Brazilian market?
All 154 members of the Association of Newspapers in Brazil (ANJ), accounting for 90 percent of the country’s newspaper circulation, recently opted out of Google News, claiming the search firm should pay them to re-run their headlines and excerpts.
In fact, the papers mentioned that Google News declined to pay for content and was driving traffic away from their websites.
“Staying with Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences, on the contrary,” the Association’s President, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, stated.
“By providing the first few lines of our stories to internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites,” he said.
The conflict aroused, according to a blog posted by Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, the issue evoked disagreement between a Google executive and a local newspaper lawyer at this week’s American Press Association General Assembly in Sao Paulo.
On the other hand, Google argued that it does not need to pay for the rights to use headlines because Google News will benefit newspapers by redirecting large volumes of traffic to their websites.
The company executive explained, “It would be absurd for a restaurant to tax a cab driver for taking tourists to eat there,” said Google executive Marcel Leonardi.
Moreover, Brazilian news companies have long complained that the number of visits that arrive from Google News has not been enough to justify the use of their headlines without receiving payment.
In fact, for long, we have already witnessed this issue unfolded in Belgium, Germany and France, where national newspapers associations have reported Google to courts and to regulators for republishing their headlines.
Admittedly, Brazil is a new ball game, with an increasingly affluent, increasingly digital middle class ready to grow the country from an “emerging market” in to a real market. If Google cannot get publishers on board, it may be missing out on some of the Latin America boom opportunity.
Besides, the news comes on the heels as Google threatened to exclude French media sites from its search results if France passes a law that would make search engines pay for content.
More so, French newspaper publishers have allegedly been pushing for a law that would make search engines pay them each time a user reads an article by clicking through to their website. Other European countries are also considering similar laws.
With intransigence stance like that on display from the publishers there, in 2011, Belgium passed a similar law and, as a result, popular titles including Le Soir and La Libre Belgique no longer appear in Google searches.