If there is one thing the Internet is not, it is not devoid of news. Whether you’re Googling a specific story or perusing the latest updates, news is everywhere in cyberspace. You can even set up specific alerts based on news categories and Google searches. A few days ago, Search Engine Land covered the hot topic of the Swedish parliament calling for consideration of a Google “link tax” for newspapers.
Niclas Malmberg, a member of the parliament, is calling for the search engine giant to help fund various Swedish news publications. His call for action closely follows the French link tax of 2013. According to TheNextWeb.com, Google, Fresh book publishers, and authors were in disputes that lasted for years. It was all over the want to create and institute a link tax on Google. The French incident ended with Google setting up a 60 million-euro Digital Publishing Innovation Fund. The goal of the fund was to support the transformation of French digital publishing initiatives.
Alarming Events Fuels Link Tax Discussion
Why did the French, and now the Swedish, push for a link tax on Google? In both cases, alarm was raised by the decline of the newspaper industry. The digital age is pulling so many people online and into a news packed environment that newspaper sales and subscriptions are dying out.
Naturally, the blame goes to Google since the majority of users use a search engine to hunt down news. And who can blame the user? Why pay for a newspaper when you already pay for Internet service, and Google search is free? It just makes sense.
According to Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling, who used both Bing and Google translate to get a look at the Swedish proposal, Malmberg is pointing to Spotify as a potential newspaper industry model. Spotify is a privately held Swedish company founded in 2006 with headquarters in London and Stockholm, Sweden. The company supplies digital music.
According to Spotify’s website, you can use their software free on mobile, tablet, and computer to listen to the music wherever you are. Spotify itself provides musicians a combination of royalties and pay based on user subscriptions. While the analogy between their model and Google News is somewhat flawed, some—like Malmberg—feel a link tax is a needed solution.
Spreading the Wealth: Link Tax on Google
In essence, Malmberg is proposing that a sort of allocation for Google ad revenue sharing take place with Swedish newspapers. The “tax” percentage or amount would vary based on traffic or market share. It all comes down to a simple idea: Spread the wealth.
Sweden and other countries in Europe believe Google is unfairly collecting profit off their content and blatantly harming the publishing and newspaper industry in the process. In fact, ZDNet.com recently covered a story where Axel Springer, a German publishing giant, gave in to the Google news snippets row. Axel Springer was demanding that Google pay to publish news snippets derived from its publications. The publisher was arguing that Germany’s ancillary copyright law made is legal to demand and collect licensing fees from major search engines for republishing portions of their stories.
The story caught some press before culminating in a solution few saw coming. The German publisher announced a free license for Google. Why the sudden change in stance? The company saw record-setting decline (nearly 40 percent) in traffic to their sites after Google stopped producing thumbnails and snippets on October 23rd.
By the first week of November, they were happy to hand Google a free license to reproduce portions of their coverage in snippets. According to Google’s statement to the Wall Street Journal, their snippets “send over 500 million clicks to German publishers each month,” and their “advertising partnerships have generated [over] €1bn [$1.25bn] in revenue for them in the last three years.”
Riches to Rags
Many in the industry believe that Google is abusing its dominate power. Some staunchly believe the monstrous company is plotting to force publishers into licensing their content for free.
As a result, link tax demands and discussion are beginning to pop up. It’s a fair assumption that we haven’t seen the last of such demands. The proposal from Swedish parliament member Niclas Malmberg is the latest attempt to capitalize revenue with an outlook toward upgrading outdated publishers to the technology of today.
The real question is whether the revenue from such a “tax” would be properly allocated and funneled into the industry. Most taxes are eventually passed on to the end user, which makes one wonder whether a link tax would ultimately fall to you and me. And would this dynamically change where we go for our online news coverage?
Intellectual copyrights have always been tricky, and link tax could add a new playing field if it ever comes into practice. Will Sweden institute a link tax on Google? The answer is anyone’s guess, but those who have tried in the past failed.
Is Google to Blame?
It’s the question at the heart of the debate. Is Google truly to blame for the noticeable decline in newspaper and hard print publishing? Is the pacesetter among search engines the reason the publishing industry is feeling the financial pinch?
While there’s no denying that a great exodus to the Internet has taken place, it’s a bit over the top to focus blame on Google. The debate can stretch on for ages with advocates pro and against Google. Regardless of whether Google’s scapegoated role for the change in user behavior is fair or not, one thing is certain: The publishing and newspaper industry needs to get with the digital age sooner rather than later.
As more industries step into the 21st Century, an issue involving us all comes into even more precise focus. What is this issue? It’s the debate of net neutrality. The dispute centers on whether businesses and websites should pay substantial fees to stay in the “fast lane” of traffic or risk vanishing into the “slow lane” of cyberspace. If net neutrality isn’t upheld, it could stifle innovation, expansion, and the creation of jobs for years to come. Learn more via our net neutrality coverage.
Photo credit: Google.se