Google reach deals with news websites
INTERNET SEARCH engine Google is understood to have reached deals with several large UK news groups over carrying their content on Google News. — The deals are reputedly being kept strictly secret for fear that Google will end up having to pay …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Sunday Herald reports that Google is understood to have struck deals with several large UK news groups over carrying their content on Google News — a claim that remains unconfirmed, with the terms reputedly kept secret precisely because a public price tag would hand every unpaid publisher leverage to demand the same. The timing matters: it lands the same week Google won legal cover for aggregation, with an appeals court affirming in the [[a:none|Perfect 10 case]] that displaying copyrighted thumbnails is fair use.
That ruling sits alongside a busy May for Google's content strategy — its new Universal Search now mixes video from Google Video and YouTube into standard results, and the company is rumored to be closing in on FeedBurner to enter RSS advertising, a deal whose announcement was delayed only by the still-pending DoubleClick acquisition.
First-order effects
- If real, the deals would put several large UK news groups on the receiving end of payments from Google News while comparable publishers continue supplying content unpaid — an asymmetry the secrecy itself is designed to protect.
- Google gains a quieter route to licensed news content than a public licensing programme would allow, avoiding a visible rate card it would then have to extend industry-wide.
Second-order effects
- Once any single deal surfaces, other UK and European publishers gain concrete evidence that Google will pay for content, converting the rumor into negotiating leverage across the whole press group.
- Rival aggregators and portals would face the same pressure to license or lose exclusivity over news content, raising their cost base relative to Google's.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points away from pure fair-use aggregation — the position the courts affirmed this month — toward a bilateral licensing market where each publisher negotiates privately with the platform, fragmenting what had been a uniform free-content arrangement.
- Private deal-making of this kind tends to precede regulatory interest: if platforms pay some outlets and not others, governments face pressure to decide whether carriage of news is a market to be regulated or a courtesy to be priced.
The trend: News aggregation is shifting from a fair-use free-for-all toward privately negotiated platform-publisher licenses, with secrecy serving as the brake on price escalation.