MILAN — Google has sealed its first license agreements in Italy with several
publishers to offer access to some of their content on the US tech group's
Showcase news platform.
اضافة اعلان
Google
News Showcase is a global product to pay news publishers for their content online
and a new service that allows partnering publishers to curate content and
provide limited access to paywalled stories for users.
Showcase
is expected to launch in Italy in the coming weeks, a media representative for
Google in Italy told Reuters.
News
publishers have long fought the world's most popular internet search engine for
compensation for using their content, with European media groups leading the
charge.
Google
said in October it planned to pay $1 billion to publishers globally for their
news over the next three years via Showcase, which will launch first in
Germany, then in Belgium, India, the Netherlands, and other countries.
Google's
agreements were signed with a number of Italian publishers, including RCS
Mediagroup, which publishes daily Corriere della Sera as well as popular sports
daily Gazzetta dello Sport, the publisher of financial daily Il Sole 24 ore and
Caltagirone editore, which owns Rome-based paper Il Messaggero.
No
financial details were disclosed.
The
accords involve 13 Italian editorial companies, giving Google Showcase users
access to content from 76 national and local papers.
The
US tech group has sealed similar deals with other news outlets around the
world, including in Germany, Brazil, and in Britain during a time when paying
for content is becoming an issue for big tech.
"We
are pleased to have reached this agreement which, by also regulating the issue
of related rights, recognizes the importance of quality information and the
authority of our publications," RCS Chief Executive Urbano Cairo said in a
statement.
RCS
said the deal with Google also included the Spanish-language papers owned by
the group — El Mundo, Marca, and Expansion.
The
accord could potentially pave the way for a resumption of the US company's news
service in Spain, which was shut down in 2014 in response to legislation which
meant it had to pay a mandatory collective licensing fee to re-publish
headlines or snippets of news.
Authorities around the world have been
introducing rules to require Google, Facebook, and others to share revenue with
publishers, including a 2019 directive from Brussels which European Union
countries are meant to enact into law by June.
Both
Italy and Spain still have to implement the new EU rules.
"We
hope parliament will address the issue soon," Fabrizio Carotti, general
director at Italy's news publisher business lobby FIEG told Reuters.
"In our view, the law should give the national
competition regulator the power to determine the criteria to establish how much
online platforms have to pay for content in case of no agreement with
publishers, helping editorial companies in their negotiations," Carotti
said.
.jpg)
.jpg)
