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Google Tests Excluding EU News Publishers from Results

Google

Business Honor
14 November, 2024

Google is testing the removal of EU-based news results in search and news for a limited group of users

A new experiment that Google plans to test will eliminate news results from EU-based publishers for a short period. The company said this test will affect a relatively small set of users, about 1 percent, in nine different European Union countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Croatia, Italy, Poland, Spain, Netherlands, and Greece. The actual aim of the tests is to track how this influences the search results and news visibility and, consequently, news traffic on publishers' sites in the regions.

The test will hence modify the way news content will appear both in Google Search and News and in the personalized Discover feed. Users within those countries will still see results from the non-EU news outlets, but all news content by those publishers based in the EU will no longer appear. Google clarified that the removal of these results is only temporary and is part of its ongoing trials to better understand how such changes could affect the user experience and publisher traffic. Still, there was no clarification on a specific timeline on when the test would end.

Even with this experiment, Google has asserted such changes will not affect its payouts deals with news publishers as contemplated in the European Union's Copyright Directive (EUCD). Today, such payouts cover more than 4,000 publishers in the EU.

Google had exercised its authority to remove or limit the visibility of news content as a bargaining chip in the past. News legislation that compels technology companies to pay out to news organizations has seen the company use previous news cases as a basis to issue threats of blocking news links. The tactic was most recently shown in the June 2023 Online News Act in Canada and was first used in Australia in 2021, when Google threatened to pull its search engine from the country over media compensation legislation.

Google has offered a pay-for-display proposal to the Canadian government, which would see Google paying $100 million annually to news organizations. It reached an agreement with the publishers in France, whose publishing rights had expired, and appears to have dealt with local publishers in Germany and Belgium as well.