Daily Democrat - Google to stop showing links to California news reports

CJL director Dr. Courtney Radsch’s was quoted urging lawmakers to take action against Google’s undemocratic threats to shut off news access in California in the midst of an election year.

"For more than a decade, tech giants built the world's most valuable companies off the backs of journalists while siphoning off revenue from news publishers by creating digital advertising monopolies,” she wrote.

Google has thrown down the gauntlet in its battle with California lawmakers and news publishers over compensation for content.

The Mountain View internet-search and digital-advertising giant will stop showing links to news stories produced by California media outlets, as it fights a state bill that would make the company and others pay fees to news publishers for content they link to on their platforms.

Google announced the move in a blog post Friday, calling it a “short-term test for a small percentage of users … to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience.” The company said it also would pause new investments in the California news industry, including the partnership initiative with news organizations and its product licensing program.

“By helping people find news stories, we help publishers of all sizes grow their audiences at no cost to them. (This bill) would up-end that model,” Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s vice president for global news partnerships, wrote in the post.

That could mean in the near future, if you searched for this story on Google, it might not show up in the results.

The move this week is a hard pivot from what a Google executive said just four months ago.

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