A radical test. As part of a “time-limited” experiment, Google will exclude news content from its search results in nine European countries, including France. The objective? Evaluate the impact of press publishers' content in the American giant's ecosystem.
During this test, launched on Thursday, content from European press publishers will be excluded from the results displayed on Google News, Google Search and on Discover for a sample of 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, in Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and France.
“We will continue to display results from other websites, including press publishers based outside the European Union,” Google specifies in a text published on the Google France Blog site.
“This test will allow us to evaluate the influence of the display of content from European press publishers on the search experience of our users and on the traffic that Google sends to publishers,” explains the company. And to specify: “When the experiment is completed, the current results will be displayed again as they were before. For the duration of the study, the payments we make to press publishers under the Copyright Directive will not be impacted. »
This experiment is part of the “Extended News Previews (ENP)” program, to comply with Article 15 of the European copyright directive. “Thanks to this new study, we hope to provide press publishers with more objective and useful data,” Google also indicates in its press release.
But in the context of renegotiation of agreements on rights related to copyright, signed between the French press and Google in March 2022, these new figures on traffic generated by information content could be crucial information for the giant digital.
Seized by the Union of Magazine Press Editors, the Paris commercial court on Wednesday ordered Google to abandon this “test”, under penalty of a “penalty of 300,000 euros per day” for each of the three targeted entities (Google LLC, Google Ireland and Google France), i.e. 900,000 euros in total. The case must be decided at a later date by a judge in summary proceedings.
Rights related to copyright were established for digital platforms by a 2019 European directive. They allow newspapers, magazines or press agencies to be remunerated when their content is reused by digital giants. In March, the case took a confrontational turn: the Competition Authority imposed a fine of 250 million euros on Google, accusing it of not having respected some of the commitments made in 2022.
