After Australia made it mandatory for search engines to pay for news, the repercussions of this decision are now being felt across the world. Seemingly, inspired by the success of Australian Media, The Indian Newspaper Society has asked Google to start paying up for their content.
In a letter to Google India’s country manager Sanjay Gupta, President of INS, L Adimoolam, stated that the search engine giant should “pay for news generated by newspapers which employ thousands of journalists on the ground at considerable expense.”
After Google struck a deal in Australia with Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) has written to Google to “properly share advertising revenues” for content published by newspapers.
The letter states, “The Society noted that over the past year publishers across the world have been raising the issue of fair payment for content and of proper sharing of advertising revenue with Google. It has also noted that Google has recently agreed to better compensate and pay publishers in France, the European Union and Australia.”
INS pointed how advertising revenues are crucial for the survival of the news industry but lamented, “Newspaper publishers are seeing their share of the advertising pie shrinking in the digital space, even as Google is taking a giant share, leaving publishers with a small share”.
The body also alleged that Google has an opaque advertising system with the news publishers unable to gauge Google’s advertising value chain. INS has demanded that along with ensuring transparency in revenue reports, the search engine giant should increase the publishers’ share of advertising revenue to 85%.
Earlier this week, the Australian Parliament passed a bill that would mandate companies such as Google and Facebook, whose primary source of revenue is advertising, to pay local publishers for news content.
This move caused a ripple effect for Google as the search engine giant has now relented to the French government. It has agreed to pay $76 million over three years to a group of 121 news publishers from France to end a more than year-long copyright spat, as the documents seen by Reuters revealed.
The technology giants like Google and Facebook have long enjoyed the lack of legislation in countries all over the world. These companies were able to circumvent the laws of the land and avoid paying taxes in countries where they are making profits. They have been influencing the domestic situation and have turned it into their monopoly.
However, they do not like it when they are asked to be answerable. Google, just like other tech giants, has shown its intention to evade taxes, however, countries are now filling the loopholes which were used to minimise the taxes paid and maximise the profits. The new legislation, be it in France or Australia, is addressing such discrepancies and loopholes which will bring these entities into a leash.
It seems that Facebook and Google will be made to pay for news not just in Australia, but across the world.
