Search giant Google, which made more than $73 billion in profits last year, is protesting a California bill that would require Google and other platforms to pay media. The company announced that it is starting a “short-term test” that will block a “small percentage” of users in the state from connecting to local news sources in California.
The move comes in response to the California Press Protection Act, which requires Google, Meta and other platforms to pay California publishers in exchange for links. Jaffer Zaidi, vice president of news partnerships at Google, said the proposed law passed by the state Legislature last year amounted to a “nexus tax.”
“If passed, CJPA could result in significant changes to the services we provide to Californians and the traffic we deliver to California publishers,” Zaidi wrote. Although the bill has not yet become law, Google has chosen to let publishers and users in California experience what these changes might look like.
The company said it would temporarily test blocking links to California news sources covered by the law to “measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience.” Zaidi did not disclose the size or duration of the testing. Google also halted new spending for California newsrooms, including “new partnerships through Google News Showcase, our product and licensing programs for news organizations, and expansion of the Google News program.”
Google isn’t the first company to adopt hard-line tactics in the face of new laws aimed at forcing tech companies to pay for news. After similar laws passed, Meta pulled news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada and threatened to do the same in California. (Meta eventually reached an agreement to pay Australian publishers when the law came into effect in 2021, but said last month it would end those relationships.)
Google has a mixed record on the issue, with the company pulling its news service from Spain for seven years in protest of local copyright laws requiring the payment of licensing fees. But the company signed deals worth about $150 million to pay Australian publishers. It also eventually backed down from its threat to remove news from Canadian search results and paid about $74 million. That may sound like a lot, but those amounts are still a fraction of the $10 billion to $12 billion that researchers estimate Google should pay publishers.
