California’s efforts to pass a bill that will force social media companies to pay news publishers to share their links online is meeting with resistance from Google, who has announced plans to block news links from certain California residents to give the state a taste for the consequences should the bill pass.
Google’s Vice President for Global News Partnerships, Jaffer Zaidi, said of the move, “We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism.” He said the passage fo the bill will “result in significant changes to the services we can offer Californians and the traffic we can provide to California publishers.”
Excerpt from www.politico.com
Californians may find their Google results bereft of local news links Friday morning as the search giant escalates its fight against a landmark state bill aimed at forcing tech giants to pay online publishers.
Google is temporarily blocking California-based news outlets’ content for some state residents, reprising a political tactic the tech industry has repeatedly used to try to derail such bills in places like Canada and Australia that require online platforms to pay journalism outlets for articles featured on their websites.