Paris (AFP)

This is Google's response to the European copyright reform: the platform refuses to pay publishers for the use of extracts of their content, but will not display them in its search results in France without their agreement.

The US digital giant has announced new rules for France that will apply next month, pursuant to a law adopted this summer in France, which transposes into French law the European directive on copyright . France is the first EU member state to implement this directive, adopted at the end of March.

This law establishes a "neighboring right" for the benefit of newspaper publishers (who publish newspapers and magazines) and other news agencies, including AFP. A measure supposed to help them pay for the recovery of their content on online platforms and other aggregators, to offset the collapse of their traditional advertising revenue, while the giants of the Net, including Facebook and Google, take the share of the lion online advertising revenue.

This directive was the subject of intense lobbying in Brussels, with an unprecedented mobilization of GAFA, which had argued that it would reduce freedom of expression on the Internet. The media companies, including the Agence France-Presse, had on the contrary pleaded for the need to obtain financial compensation from platforms and other news aggregators who, up to now, have retrieved their information free of charge, in the form of excerpts , while these cost them more and more expensive to produce.

But the rules presented Wednesday by Richard Gingras, vice president of Google in charge of information, to comply with French law, do not go in this direction.

Press editors based in Europe will now have to decide individually whether, in France, excerpts of their news (texts, videos ...), or "snippets", and other miniature images (also called thumbnails or "thumbnails") will continue 'appear next to links to their sites. And this, both in the results of the search engine than in Google News.

For publishers who accept, these excerpts will be displayed without being paid by Google.

- "A kind of blackmail" -

If they refuse, these snippets and other mini-images will no longer be displayed in the search engine results, which will only include a title and a "dry" link to the news of the publishers concerned. . But the news of these media will still be referenced, ensures Google, even if these publishers of the press may see traffic to their sites decrease or fall.

If Google has not brandished the weapon of a total closure of Google News (the French version of Google News), as it had done in 2014 in Spain, the pill is hard to swallow for publishers, who thus see the hopes of spin-offs related to the neighboring right reduced.

"It was predictable, Google does not want to collaborate constructively, we could expect this kind of blackmail," said Joy de Looz-Corswarem, European Affairs Officer at the European Magazine Media Association (EMMA). ) and the European Newspaper Publisher's Association, interviewed by AFP in Brussels.

"It's not surprising that they did in Germany in 2014: remove from Google News the displays of abstracts and images of the German press group Springer," said this representative of European press publishers.

Conversely, for Richard Gingras, the new rules introduced in France are in the interests of Internet users, because they will prevent the results of research are distorted by commercial considerations. "We never paid to include results in research and we do not pay to include links in the results" because "it would undermine the trust of our users," he says.

In addition, Google likes to remind that it already helps a lot of the media, first of all by the huge traffic that it brings to their sites, and by its many trainings, services and programs of support to the press, as the Google News Initiative, an innovation support fund. And Mr. Gingras says he is "ready to continue discussing what we could do more for the future of the press".

© 2019 AFP