By pushing the “link tax” in the EU, publishers are shooting themselves in the foot because better options exist by working with Google to drive traffic
Within Google, some call into question the validity of helping the media industry. By lobbying the EU on the “link tax”, publishers are waging a rearguard battle. Tweets: @badams and @martinsteiger Tweets: Barry Adams / @badams : I am sympathetic to news publishers' plights in the digital age, but Articles 11's ‘link tax’ is an absurd law that will solve nothing. This is a great piece by @filloux on Articles 11 & 13's flaws: http://mondaynote.com/... H/T @glenngabe Martin Steiger / @martinsteiger : «In France, the hazy anti-Google feeling combines with a deep-rooted culture of subsidies—which contributed to severely hinder innovation in the French digital media industry.» http://mondaynote.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-fight: European publishers have been lobbying to strengthen copyright rules and curb Google's ad power since at least 2015 (years of coordinated pressure), and Article 11 is their legislative vehicle. Monday Note's argument is that the tax targets the wrong lever — referral traffic — and that within Google itself, some now question whether helping media is worth it.
The counterweight already exists in the record: Google's VP of News has invoked the 2014 shutdown of Google News in Spain as a warning against repeating that outcome in Europe, while Reddit and Wikimedia framed the broader copyright package as a blow to the open web. The eventual proof of the alternative path came later, when News Corp struck a multi-year global deal for significant payments from Google — money extracted by negotiation, not statute.
First-order effects
- Publishers backing Article 11 put their largest single traffic source at risk: Google's own news leadership has signaled it would rather withdraw news surfaces in Europe than pay a per-link levy, as it did in Spain.
- Google faces a strategic fork — keep subsidizing an industry that lobbies against it or let the link tax pass and cut losses, with internal voices questioning the value of the help.
Second-order effects
- Platform-side resistance hardens beyond Google: Reddit calls the copyright regime a significant blow to the open internet and Wikimedia decries a missed chance to modernize it, giving the publisher lobby a broad tech-industry opposition front.
- The negotiating track gains leverage either way — once regulators in Australia and France move to make platforms pay for news, bilateral deals like News Corp's become the template publishers could have pursued without the tax.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news economics split into two models — statutory levies pushed through regulators versus direct platform contracts — and the jurisdictions watching Australia and France will decide which one becomes default.
- A link-tax regime that drives platforms to delist or deprioritize news would structurally shift distribution power away from search referrals, leaving publishers more dependent on subscriptions and subsidies — the French subsidy culture Martin Steiger points to.
The trend: Publishers are trading open linking for regulated or contractual payments from platforms, and the choice between statute and negotiation is becoming the defining fault line of the platform-news relationship.