"Tax on Google" - now in Germany

Germany passed a law that obliges all search engines and news aggregators to pay royalties to the authors of news articles from media sites.

This law, called the “Google tax,” was supported by a coalition of the two leading parties in parliament - the Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democratic Party, Die Welt reports. 293 deputies voted “for”, 243 “against”, three abstained.

The law does not say how much compensation a news publisher can expect, there is no specific calculation system, but copyright holders, based on this law, will be able to go to court and complain about search engines.

According to amendments made to the bill by the Bundestag Legal Affairs Committee on the eve of the vote, search engines can display small fragments of news with a link to the original sites for free. The size of these fragments is not specified.

Google criticized the amendments at the development stage. Google even made a video that calls for not limiting the freedom of search on the Internet.

According to Ralf Breimer, a spokesman for German Google, the new law is being lobbied by large German publishing houses, and due to vague wording, Twitter and Facebook and even online stores that quote news items may fall under the law.

The “search engine tax” has long been discussed in France. A year ago, Nicolas Sarkozy, who was the president of France at that time, spoke about this; in the fall of 2012, the new head of the country, Francois Hollande, remembered this. Google was hostile to these intentions and promised to exclude links to French media sites from the search engine.

“Search engines impose a certain format of consumption - one news from one site. Google gives direct access to texts, takes away readers from the media. People get used to using Google and do not go to the media site,” explains German Klimenko, director and owner of LiveInternet. “I read the news I won’t go any further, but the depth of viewing is falling. The authors of specific materials only benefit from this law - they are freed from the dictates of the publication’s editors. At the same time, traffic, and therefore the earnings of specific publications, are falling, and they cannot pay the authors.” .

Such situations arise in different countries, but we are still far from this, says the founder of LiveInternet. "In Russia there is a theory that search engines give traffic and this is great. The ideology of search engines like Google and Yandex is that they show a story that tells the story most fully. News agencies release news quickly, and other sites later release processed and updated news. Here the question arises: what news should be indexed by a search engine? “Everyone is right in their own way,” Klimenko believes. “Newsmakers cannot make claims against search engines until the newsmakers themselves have developed network standards for writing news.” which will last a long time."