Google News could close its doors in Europe. The aggregation service is directly affected by a new copyright law that is in the process of being adopted by the EU. Google refuses to pay publishers for their content, so the web giant would rather stop its platform.
Google News may well disappear in Europe. According to Bloomberg, the Mountain View firm is seriously considering closing the service there if a new copyright law is adopted in the EU. Among other things, it provides that content aggregation platforms pay the media when they refer to one of their articles. An economic model considered unacceptable for the American group, which would then simply prefer to stop the charges rather than pay to be able to catalogue links.
Google News already unavailable in Spain
The most ironic thing about this story is that if this happens, Google will certainly do the best job. For their part, users will no longer have access to a very practical and popular service. And the media will lose a significant source of traffic and therefore revenue. These new European measures will also have consequences on YouTube, which has been fighting against Article 13 for months. This gives more responsibility to the platforms on the respect of authors' rights. Here again, Google has warned: if the law passes in this form, it will have to crack down and automatically strike videos that use content (visual, sound) for which the creator does not have the rights.
For Google News, the threat of closing the service are not just words in the air. It has already been unavailable in Spain since 2014, when a law aimed at forcing aggregators to pay content providers was implemented. According to a study published by a Spanish association in 2017, the shutdown of Google News caused an average 13% drop in traffic for small media.