Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. has signed its first license agreements in Italy with a number of publishers to make some of their content available on the Showcase news website of the US tech giant.
Google News Showcase is a global product for paying news publishers for their web content, as well as a news service that enables partnering publishers to curate content and provides consumers with limited access to paywalled stories.
Showcase is scheduled to launch in Italy in the coming weeks, according to a Google media representative.
News publishers have long battled for compensation from the world’s most successful internet search engine, with European media groups leading the charge.
In October 2020, Google announced that it will pay $1 billion to publishers globally for their news over the next three years via Showcase, which will launch in Germany first, followed by Belgium, India, the Netherlands, and other nations.
RCS Mediagroup, which publishes the daily Corriere Della Sera as well as the popular sports daily Gazzetta Dello Sport, the publisher of the financial daily Il Sole 24 ore, and Caltagirone editore, which owns the Rome-based paper Il Messaggero, are among the Italian publishers who have signed agreements with Google.
There was no financial information given.
The agreements, which include 13 Italian editorial firms, provide Google Showcase users with content from 76 national and local newspapers.
Similar agreements have been reached with news organizations in Germany, Brazil, and Britain by the US tech giant.
“We are pleased to have reached this agreement, which recognizes the value of quality information and the authority of our publications by also regulating the issue of related rights,” RCS Chief Executive Urbano Cairo said in a statement.
The deal with Google, according to RCS, included the Spanish-language papers El Mundo, Marca, and Expansion, which are all owned by the group.
The agreement could pave the way for the resumption of the American company’s news service in Spain, which was shut down in 2014 due to legislation requiring it to pay a mandatory collective license fee to republish headlines or snippets of news.
Authorities all over the world have been enacting rules requiring Google, Facebook, and other companies to share revenue with publishers, including a 2019 guideline from Brussels that European Union countries are expected to enact into law by June.
The new EU rules must also be implemented in both Italy and Spain.
“We hope Parliament will discuss the problem soon,” said Fabrizio Carotti, general director of FIEG, the Italian news publisher industry lobby.
“In our opinion, the legislation should empower the national competition regulator to decide the conditions for determining how many online platforms would pay for content in the case of a lack of agreement with publishers, thus assisting editorial companies in their negotiations,” Carotti said.
