After years of announcements, promises and projects that are difficult to get off the ground, a (perhaps) decisive turning point arrives in the relationship between Google and publishers. The American giant has put something really concrete on the plate: one billion dollars to invest in three years to support publishing through a series of agreements on a global scale with various newspapers. The news has been spread with a post by the CEO himself of Alphabet, the parent company Big G, Sundar Pichai.
A new product was born from the initiative, called “Google News Showcase”. Unlike what happened so far with Google News - the content aggregator against which publishers have always railed, asking to be paid for linked news - this time Google "will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience,” Pichai said, adding that publishers will choose what news to show and how to do it.
Google News Showcase was officially born on October XNUMXst in Brazil and Germany, through partnerships with various publishing companies including Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. It will also expand to other countries in the future. So far Mountain View has signed agreements with about 200 newspapers scattered between Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada UK and Australia.
Showcase appears in the Google News smartphone apps and allows users to directly read a series of articles from individual newspapers.
The Enpa, the association of European publishers, criticized the announcement, calling Showcase "anti-competition".
According to the Digiday website, to be a partner in the project, Google would ask publishers not to file lawsuits against the company. The reference is to the new one European copyright directive, which Italy should implement within the year with a draft law approved on September 9 in committee in the Senate. Among other things, the directive provides for the possibility for publishers to request payment for the use of short fragments of text (snippets) and the obligation for sites that host content published by users (such as social networks) to prevent the unauthorized posting of copyrighted content.
