Google News: Search Engine Giant Declines To Pay For News Snippets In France Under EU Copyright Regulations

Google said Wednesday that it will change how it shows previews of news in France, as the search engine giant declines to pay license fees for publishers under new EU copyright regulations.

Google users in France will only see headlines in their searches, but no thumbnail images or first few lines of the article, unless the publisher allows Google to do so. This change will be implemented on all Google services, the company said in a statement on Google France's blog.

"We don't pay for links to be included in search results," Google's vice president of news, Richard Gringras, told reporters. "Doing so would not only skew the options we might provide but it would ultimately undermine the trust users have in how search and news work on Google."

In addition, Google is implementing new settings that will allow European publishers to choose how their content is represented when it shows up in the search engine.

On Tuesday, Google won a major EU case, with the company not having to apply "right to be forgotten" rules outside of France. "Right to be forgotten" refers to a 2014 ruling that said that individuals have the right to control what the public sees online in a search engine.

In March, the European Union passed sweeping changes to the bloc's copyright rules, a directive called "Copyright in the Digital Single Market." The regulation is partially meant to protect news outlets, and guarantee that they are compensated fairly for the dissemination of their stories online.

Google has said that law will hurt "Europe's creative and digital economies." Social media website Twitter, along with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, are also concerned about the regulation.

The rapporteur for the copyright directive, Member of European Parliament Axel Voss, has likened Google to a "digital dictatorship" and that "they are using their economic power to take everything in their path out of their way."