Alphabet Inc’s Google has reached agreements with over 300 European Union-based news publications in order to publish their stories on the search engine. 

Publishers in Germany including ZEIT, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Spiegel, along with others in Hungary, France, Austria, the Netherlands and Ireland have signed up to the agreement with the search engine, Google said in a blog post on Wednesday. The post did not reveal how much Google would pay for the deals. 

The European Copyright Directive, which came into force in 2019, was the culmination of an effort from the European Union to ensure publishers from inside the bloc are compensated for their content. The copyright law, which is being rolled out across the region by each country, allows publishers to ask for payment whenever online platforms use their content. The new rules have allowed news outlets to negotiate with web platforms such as Google and Facebook over the reproduction of their content.

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In 2021, Google entered an agreement with German publishers to create criteria for payments to publishers with an exemption for hosting small extracts of stories, which can be used free of charge. Google is now expanding the roll-out of these agreements through a web tool, to facilitate future deals with publishers.

Over 220 news outlets in Germany have now entered into these licensing agreements with Google, the company announced in a seperate blog post on Wednesday. These agreements aren’t limited to print publishers but also to multimedia, such as TV channels n-tv and RTL.

Australia has also been forcing tech giants to renegotiate payments with content providers. In early 2021, Facebook Inc. reached a multiyear deal with News Corp. in Australia, agreeing to pay Rupert Murdoch’s publishing arm for access to additional stories. BM

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