Google restricts news access as state considers journalism bill
SACRAMENTO — Google announced Friday that it is removing links to California news websites for some Californians in response to a state bill that would force the search engine to pay news companies for their content.
The California Journalism Preservation Act, or CJPA, would make tech giants like Facebook, Google and Microsoft pay news organizations a “journalism usage fee.” The fees would be calculated as a percentage of ad revenue and set based on an arbitration agreement between news publishers and large digital platforms. The bill would require news organizations to spend at least 70% of the revenue to pay journalists.
The legislation would cost tech platforms an unknown but potentially significant amount of money, Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s vice president of global news partnerships, wrote in a Friday blog post.
“The uncapped financial exposure created by CJPA would be unworkable,” he wrote. “If enacted, CJPA in its current form would create a level of business uncertainty that no company could accept.”
In response, Google has started to remove links to California news websites for a “small percentage of California users.” The “short-term test” will let Google assess how the proposal might affect the company if it becomes law, Zaidi wrote.
Supporters of the bill argue that tech platforms benefit financially from news articles posted to their websites, which help them attract and retain visitors. The platforms are not paying the journalists who produce the content, however, effectively starving news organizations of advertising revenue generated by their own work.
The San Francisco Chronicle is among the news organizations that support the bill, along with the California Broadcasters Association, the California News Publishers Association, many other trade and labor organizations representing journalists and individual news organizations.
Google and other companies targeted by the bill launched an aggressive opposition campaign last year. A tech-financed group launched a campaign to kill the bill by pointing out that it would help fund Fox News, a bitter pill in the Democrat-dominated California Legislature. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, threatened to pull news from its platforms if the measure passed.
The bill’s author, Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, called Meta’s threat a “scare tactic.”
The measure, AB886, passed the Assembly but stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee amid intense opposition from the tech companies. Erin Ivie, a spokesperson for Wicks, said earlier this year that the bill is still a “top priority” for the Oakland Democrat.
“Getting this policy right is more important than getting it quick,” Wicks said in a statement at the time. “My priority is making sure this bill does exactly, and only, what it intends: to support our free press and the democracy sustained by it, to make sure publications get paid what they are owed, and to hold our nation’s largest and wealthiest tech companies accountable for repurposing content that’s not theirs.”
Wicks and Sen. Tom Umberg, the Santa Ana Democrat who chairs the committee, have not yet announced changes to the bill. It could become law if senators pass it ahead of summer deadlines.