Report from Digital Watch
In Brief – Poland’s competition regulator has opened an investigation of Google that accuses the search giant of abusing its market dominance in negotiations with news publishers over payments for the use of media article snippets in results for Google Search, Google News and Discover. The case stems from a 2024 change in Polish copyright law that implemented an EU directive giving publishers “neighboring” rights to payments when large platforms use their content. Poland’s UOKiK says Google failed to provide publishers with proper information needed to determine whether its payment offers are fair. Google responded that it has licensing deals with over 70 publications in Poland and said it is ‘the only platform with a structured approach to remunerating news publishers at scale’.
Context – Media companies have been tirelessly lobbying for years to have governments compel Google and Meta to pay them when news content appears on their platforms. Australia and France were the most responsive. We’ll focus on France and the process is Europe. France quickly conformed their copyright law to include the neighboring rights provision of the 2019 EU Copyright Directive and threatened Google with antitrust sanctions if they did not pay media companies when “snippets” were used in search results. Google agreed to start paying in 2021 and has followed suit in other markets. Meta eventually followed a different path. Meta blocked news in Canada in 2023 rather than comply with their media payments regime. Meta also ended snippets for media posts in Poland to avoid the obligation to make neighboring rights payments, resulting in an antitrust investigation begun by OUKiK in 2024 that remains open today. This past May, the European Court of Justice upheld the legality of Italy’s regulatory regime overseeing the negotiating process for media neighboring rights, although the court decision appeared to leave open the option of platforms choosing to cut off snippets. Australia responded to Meta’s decision to stop paying by enacting a new tax on large social media and search platforms that won’t pay its media companies.