Question of the Fortnight
No news is bad news, say leading websites and campaigners
Will EU law wreck Google search results?
Have we ever printed a duller screenshot than the one on the right? No photos, no headlines - just links to newspapers and broadcasters. And yet it captures a fascinating conflict between the European Union and tech giants like Google and Facebook. It’s a clash of ideas that could end up with content being wiped from the internet, and - mercifully you might say - has nothing to do with Brexit.
The stark image is Google’s warning to the rest of the world, created as part of its campaign against the EU Copyright Directive. The law, which aims to “harmonise” copyright legislation in the EU, has two parts that tech companies say threaten free speech.
Article 11 states that search engines like Google and Microsoft’s Bing must pay newspapers and TV channels for showing snippets of news from their sites. That explains the blank screenshot: if Google refuses to pay the Liverpool Echo for stories, it won’t be allowed to publish them in search results.
In reality, Google’s results won’t be totally barren. They’ll still include news from publishers and broadcasters the company has made deals with. But Google says this will force it to pick “winners and losers”, paying for content from the most visited sites while ignoring less popular ones.
Critics of the law call it a ‘link tax’, and warn it will mean news from smaller news outlets will vanish from search results. But those in favour (including big publishing companies) say Google should pay for the news they link to, in order to keep newspapers and TV channels alive.
Some might think that threatening to remove news stories is Google’s version of project fear, but the company has done it before. When a similar law was passed in Spain in 2014, Google closed its News section, triggering a sharp fall in web visits to Spanish news sites.
The other troublesome part of the directive is Article 13, which forces websites like Youtube and Facebook to remove or block content (music, video and images) that breaks copyright law. This is a massive task. It would mean, for example, Youtube taking down videos uploaded by users even if they just use a small portion of a copyrighted song as background music.
Critics label it a ‘meme ban’, referring to viral videos that spread through the internet, many of which are humorous parodies using copyrighted music or videos (perhaps the most celebrated are the ‘Hitler rants’ spoofs inspired by the 2004 German film Downfall: www.snipca.com/30397). In December, protestors against Article 13 delivered to the
European Parliament a petition signed by four million people.
Together, these articles might make the web a less informative and entertaining place – fewer news stories, no amusing spoof videos. Google’s pages would be riddled with gaps, looking as though they hadn’t loaded properly.
But there’s been a late twist. Although MEPS have voted in favour of the law, negotiations between the EU and governments have failed to agree the final wording.
In January, 11 countries, including Germany and Italy, voted against the latest version of the bill, citing several objections to the two offending articles. Google’s warnings of a disrupted internet may have worked.
It probably means the law is dead until the two problematic articles are watered down, or removed completely. If so, Google would have won a major victory over the EU’S lawmakers.
The law might make the web less informative and entertaining – fewer news stories, no spoof videos