Brazil’s newspapers opt out of Google News
A woman reads a newspaper in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
Brazil's newspapers have pulled their content from Google News, saying the aggregator was driving traffic and revenue away from their websites.
The 154 members of Brazil's National Association of Newspapers (ANJ), which account for 90 percent of the country's circulation, all opted to take the organization's recommendation to ban Google from using their content, BBC News reported.
“Google News benefits commercially from that quality content and is unwilling to discuss a remuneration model for the production of these materials,” said ANJ president Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto in an e-mail interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
“We concluded (…) that staying in Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences. On the contrary, by providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the changes that they will look at the entire story in our websites," he added.
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Google backed its lack of payment for its Brazilian news at a conference in Sao Paulo.
"Google News channels a billion clicks to news sites around the world," said Google's Public Policy Director, Marcel Leonardi, likening Brazilian paper's requests for payment "to taxing a taxi driver for taking tourists to eat at a restaurant," RT News reported.
Google is facing similar complaints from publishers in the European Union, most recently France, who say that the giant search engine should have to pay a licensing fee for featuring its content; Google counters that it has forwarded millions of clicks to French news outlets.
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