Google Considering Pulling News Service From Europe Due to Proposed Copyright Directive ⇥ bloomberg.com

Natalia Drozdiak, Bloomberg:

Google is considering pulling its Google News service from Europe as regulators work toward a controversial copyright law.

The European Union’s Copyright Directive will give publishers the right to demand money from the Alphabet Inc. unit, Facebook Inc. and other web platforms when fragments of their articles show up in news search results, or are shared by users. The law was supposed to be finalized this week but was delayed by disagreement among member states.

An alternative could be to display search results without excerpts, photos, or titles. To illustrate this, Google showed Search Engine Land what search results could look like based on their reading of the proposed copyright directive, and they are hysterical. I can’t imagine this will have any positive benefit for publishers or reporters, but it absolutely will have a negative effect for users.