On Friday, Google responded to a pending invoice within the California state legislature, the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), that may require Google to pay a hyperlink tax to publishers by testing eradicating hyperlinks to California based mostly publishers and pausing investments in information publishers inside the state.
Google wrote, “To arrange for doable CJPA implications, we’re starting a short-term check for a small proportion of California customers.”
Google mentioned they’re “testing course of entails eradicating hyperlinks to California information web sites, probably coated by CJPA, to measure the influence of the laws on our product expertise.”
Then Google additionally mentioned, “Till there’s readability on California’s regulatory setting, we’re additionally pausing additional investments within the California information ecosystem, together with new partnerships by Google Information Showcase, our product and licensing program for information organizations, and deliberate expansions of the Google Information Initiative.”
This isn’t the primary time Google made this transfer, a decade in the past, an analogous factor in Spain happened, solely to return in 2022. Identical in different nations like Canada and others.
Google is actually threatening states and nations. As Greg Sterling wrote on X, “It’s completely wonderful for Google to talk out on coverage points it disagrees with. It’s additionally wonderful for Google to not carry any information. It’s not wonderful for the corporate to try to intimidate lawmakers and publishers.”
There are quite a lot of good write ups and commentary on this subject that Techmeme introduced all collectively.
Are you based mostly in California? Are you on this check the place you do not see snippets from California based mostly publishers?
I checked and nonetheless seeing California information sources right here (no less than @latimes particularly).
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) April 14, 2024
Discussion board dialogue at X.
