Recently, regulators of Germany and France are considering the adoption of measures designed to affect the profits of news aggregators on the internet. Although both proposals do not make express reference to the Mountain View giant, it is clear that the measures, if approved, would constitute some kind of “Google Tax”.
The two countries, however, are placing very different boundaries to their proposals:
- In Germany, the proposal of a so-called “Leistungsschutzrecht” (ancillary copyright law) mainly aims to place the aggregation of editorial contents online under a specific license, which may be granted by the author/editor of such contents, thus giving him the right to require payment of adequate remuneration for its issuance;
- In France, instead, a bill, advocated by some associations of publishers, is proposing to the Parliament a more radical approach: treat as ancillary copyright not only the news aggregating business activities, but also the entire online search engines’, thus considerably increasing the scope of such a hypothetical remuneration of authorship.
Both projects are obviously at embryonic stage, and shall therefore be discussed by the relevant institutions.
However, what seems to emerge, at this state, is the clear intention of the European editors to put a stop to the “free riding“ behavior of aggregators in general, and in particular to their chief representative on the Internet, Google: so far, in fact, all profits made by banner advertising and sponsoring of news contents and search results has escaped any form of fair compensation, only to increase revenues of the most important search engine on the web. However, if Google benefits (in terms of advertising revenues) from the aggregation of content produced by a publisher/editor/author, it seems reasonable to grant to the owner of the original contents some fair share of the economic benefit, just as it is already happening for music videos on youtube, by means of a network of agreements with many collecting societies.
At first glance, the German law proposal, whose content appears to sum up the experience gained by the cited YouTube agreements, has a good chance of being approved as it is, while we are not entirely sure about what the effects of a possible implementation of the French proposal might be: right now, whenever a publisher files a copyright notification to Google, requesting removal of illegal content from the Blogger platform hosting as well from the other products of the brand, the Mountain View company promptly acts to remove such content; the same duly happens to removal requests concerning search results: if properly motivated, they are carried on with diligence by Google (largely after the many legal proceedings it has undergone, during the last years).
What would happen, however, if, by law, a large number of search results suddenly became “payware” for Google?
There are two hypothetical scenarios ahead:
- In the first case, to avoid the fee, Google could introduce automated filters to remove results that involve economic costs: such a provision would, however, greatly deprive of sense the very notion of “global search engine”, and would also create a certain disaffection for the medium – not to mention that, so far, all requests regarding the adoption of such a method filed during legal proceedings have been discarded by Google as  “expensive, inefficient and against freedom of speech”;
- In the second and more likely scenario, however, Google may respond by appealing to the European Court of Justice against such a measure, complaining of unfair barriers to freedom of economic initiative.
We will, therefore, closely keep watch over the two proposals, to see if they are implemented, and what kind of measures will be adopted, against “free-riding” of editorial contents online.

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