Still no framework agreement, but in the meantime the turning point with the first agreements with the individual newspapers. France is the first country which, implementing a European directive on copyright dated spring 2019, the first country in which Google will pay media groups to publish news on their platforms: both those of the Google search engines and Google News, and that of the new Showcase service, launched in October in Brazil and Germany but which will extend throughout the world with the promise of paying a total of one billion dollars to newspapers. Meanwhile, France is leading the way (which will be followed by Australia while Italy has also started the practice), even if the numbers of the agreement are not yet known: suspicion, given that some publishers speak of a "compromise ”, is that it is a downward figure.
The pax signed with the American giant so far have been, with three-month agreements, Le Monde, Courrier international, The Obs, Le Figaro, Liberation and L'Express. “The objective – wrote Google itself on its blog – is to extend the agreement to other players in the national and regional press, as well as weeklies. We are in negotiation with numerous newspapers”. In addition to the good news, however, the impression remains of the need for a sector agreement, also to protect the smallest companies, which would have very little power in a negotiation. This is why the Alliance de la presse d'information générale (APIG, which represents about 200 newspapers) is carrying out the negotiations, which it expects to close by 2020. Even there, it is not yet known how much Google will pay and how the news will be distributed. resources, which must be divided among many realities.
APIG is asking for 150 million euros a year, a reasonable figure in itself and which according to the calculations of the publishers accounts for only half of lost advertising revenue due to the "cannibalization" of Google. But if you think that big tech has allocated 1 billion for the whole world (a high and round figure but very small if distributed over all the realities of the planet), then the proportion falters. In any case, Google is forced to reach an agreement after the publishers appealed to the French Antitrust to urge the world's most famous search engine to comply with the rules. Meanwhile the French go ahead: in addition to the publications mentioned and the Alliance, the AFP - Agence France Presse, the transalpine Ansa are also in negotiations, while many publishers are already thinking of not limiting themselves to Google but of knocking on others' doors news aggregators. Facebook and Twitter are advised.
