For the past decade, as news outlets struggled to make money in a changing digital market, governments worldwide have been tabling laws to require major tech companies to compensate news outlets for their content.
For just as long, in just about any country attempting to legislate the relationship between the news and digital platforms, Google’s former vice president of news Richard Gingras could be found, arguing that the bills are misguided and that the company is a crusader for a free web, not the scary monolith critics make it out to be.
His presence in countries across the globe reveals just how far-reaching Google’s influence is. He has negotiated with Australian legislators, testified to Canadian parliamentary committees and rubbed shoulders with Brazilian journalists at Google’s invite-only “unconference” in Sao Paulo.
Though governments have approached their laws differently, Gingras and other Google public affairs professionals based in dozens of countries across the world have fought against bargaining laws in very similar ways.
“I wouldn’t call it a playbook, that’s far too structured,” said Gingras of the company’s lobbying efforts in an interview with our reporters. But, he said, “we’re not entirely stupid.”
“If you get hit by a two-by-four enough times, you might learn to duck.”
Meta, too, campaigned against the legislation in multiple countries.
A collaborative investigation found Google and Meta’s public policy battles with governments and some major media outlets to stop or delay bargaining bills and protect their profits — through building relationships with media, throwing party-like events, making private deals with publishers, turning the public against the media and leaning on the might of the U.S. government — have been vigorous, sustained, and in many countries, successful.
The investigation is part of the project Big Tech’s Invisible Hand, a coalition of 17 media outlets working in 13 countries, led by Agência Pública and Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP), to investigate Big Tech lobbying tactics around the world.
Asked by this investigation about its lobbying strategies, Google responded with an official statement: “Like many companies, we regularly engage with policymakers and others on a wide range of issues, including about how policies may affect people who use our products. We transparently report our interactions with officials in accordance with local regulations.”
In its own statement, Meta said that “Like many companies across industries and geographies, we engage with government officials, trade groups, and third-party organizations to share information about our products and services and to contribute to discussions that may impact Meta or people’s experiences on our platforms. We will continue to collaborate with these groups and promote public debate, always with the goal of establishing the best possible framework for the internet.”
Feeling the heat
Google’s public policy machine faced its first set of significant challenges in the 2010s. In that decade, the European Union enacted copyright directives allowing member nations to pass laws to compel dominant news aggregators, like Google and Meta, to compensate outlets for the news content on their platforms.
The EU says the rules strengthen “the bargaining position of press publishers when they negotiate the use of their content by online services,” and their objective is “to promote the best possible environment to develop innovative business models.”
Spain was among first countries to pass copyright laws addressing the relationship between platforms like Google and news publishers. In response, Google excluded Spanish news from the Google News tab of its search engine in 2014. “It’s with real sadness that on 16 December (before the new law comes into effect in January) we’ll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain,” Gingras wrote in a blog post at the time — unveiling a strategy the company and Meta would use in future negotiations.
Another blow came with France’s 2019 law, which required Google to pay for displaying “snippets,” or summaries and photos associated with news articles, in search results. To avoid paying, Google removed the summaries and images from news links, leaving just the headline in its results.
But the public policy floodgates opened with the passage of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) in February 2021. While the code’s powers to force bargaining between the tech platforms and news publishers have never actually been used, the threat of the law was enough to pressure Google and Meta into signing deals with media companies to use their content.
Major media outlets pushed hard for the mandatory code as Google, Meta and their supporters strongly criticized the law.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s former head of public affairs, called the code a camouflaged “bid for cash subsidies behind distortions about how the internet works.”
Australian legislators, meanwhile, argued the code was a necessary tool to rebalance the online advertising market. Former Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg, in a speech about the bill, said the code would “address the bargaining power imbalances that exist between digital platforms and Australian news media businesses.”
Last century, advertising was one of the main sources of income for news media, but since ads shifted online, companies like Google and Meta have taken home the lion’s share of the earnings. Last year, the global online ad market hit $1 trillion in revenue for the first time.
Google and Meta have long been dominant in the digital advertising market. According to Check my Ads, Google commanded 39 per cent of global online advertising revenue in 2023, while Meta took home 18 per cent.
Last September, the U.S. Department of Justice said Google controlled 91 per cent of the publisher ad server market. The company argued that taking into account all digital advertising, its share was closer to 10 per cent.
Meanwhile, newspapers and journalism outlets have seen their ad-based business models disappear. Shrinking newsrooms, declining payments and precarious working conditions mean there is less money for accountability journalism. Reporters Without Borders found news outlets are facing more economic pressure worldwide in 2025 than in any year before.
“We cannot overemphasize how serious the situation has become for community journalism,” Chris Ashfield, the president of the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association in Western Canada, told Canadian lawmakers in September 2022. “Advertising revenues have declined to the point where most community newspaper publishers are operating with a skeleton staff.”
Throughout the 2010s, Australia’s journalist workforce shrank by nearly 19 per cent. In Canada, between 2008 and April 2025, 566 local news outlets closed in 372 communities. In Brazil, 1,460 news outlets have gone under since 2000.
Australia’s competition watchdog launched an inquiry into Google and Meta’s market dominance in 2018. That helped prompt the country’s government to introduce the NNMBC in late 2020.
That code required the companies to compensate news publishers for news “snippets” featuring a photo and a headline that appeared on Facebook or in Google search results and other products, which news sites argued gave users enough information they could avoid going to the outlet’s website.
Google and Meta rejected the premise. They argued the codes would “break Google Search,” and said their platforms were actually helping publishers by sending Google users to news sites 24 billion times each month.
They mobilized supporters critical of the bill, including the inventor of the world wide web, who took issue with the premise that Google and Meta were “stealing” news content from outlets.
Saying that Google and Meta have “stolen” ad dollars from media outlets is “just a bad analysis,” said Gingras in an interview for this investigation. The use of news snippets in search is “fair use”, he says, “when we send a lot of traffic”.
“The more important thing is this is a dramatically different advertising market.”
In February 2021, the NBMC passed. Google and Meta could sidestep the requirement to pay mandatory fees by directly bargaining with platforms, and they proceeded to do just that with select publishers.
Right after the NMBC came into effect, it seemed to have the desired outcome. Journalist job advertisements reportedly increased by 46 per cent according to a study by the Australia Institute, and several hundred jobs were created, although the study noted it was challenging to calculate what direct contribution the code had made to journalism employment because of the secrecy of the deals.
Other governments started to table legislation of their own. Brazil included news compensation in its 2021 Fake News Bill. Canada ran consultations in 2021 and introduced the bill that became the Online News Act in 2022. Indonesia’s Presidential Regulation on Publishers’ Rights was issued in 2024. Even Google’s home state tabled the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) in 2023, after the U.S. federal Journalism Competition and Preservation Act was proposed the same year.
Google’s playbook?
Facing a firestorm of regulation, Meta and Google needed to respond to all of them, quickly.
“Google is a global company,” said Madhav Chinnappa, a former Google News executive said in an interview. “It’s not going to work for Google to have 193 different ways of dealing with the news industry.”
He said the set of strategies used by the company to argue against the legislation in each country was a result of learning and improving its approach. “You’d actually want there to be a playbook, because that gives you greater consistency.”
While major news corporations lobbied hard for bargaining or copyright bills, their campaigns often lacked the funds and global reach that Google and Meta have.
When Google’s home state was in the throes of debating the CJPA, the company spent $10.7 million on lobbying in California in a single quarter of 2024. That’s nearly 50 times more than Google’s average quarterly lobbying spending in the state since 2021.
The News Media Alliance, a journalism trade group which represents about 2,200 U.S. publishers and was strongly in support of the CJPA, also increased their lobbying spending in the state that same quarter, but shelled out just $70,000.
In Brazil, Google spent nearly US$400,000 on ads on Facebook and Spotify, in newspapers, radio stations and billboards to criticize the Fake News Bill, which had a provision for Big Tech platforms to compensate news outlets.
It even reportedly adjusted its search algorithms to direct users to negative messages about the legislation, according to research by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, though Gingras denies that claim. Ahead of the vote on the bill, visits by Big Tech representatives to Congress people surged.
Between March and June 2023 there were more visits by lobbyists than in the 18 months prior, according to data collected by Agência Pública for this investigation.
Days ahead of the vote, Henrique Matos, then Google’s head of news partnerships in Latin America, argued in a blog post for a Google-established private fund that could “benefit the entire industry — rather than just select media outlets or specific groups” as the Fake News Law would.
But that was only another tactic, says Carla Egydio, a lobbyist for the Digital News Association (Ajor), a leading online news group in Brazil. “They said, look, I think the Australia solution is not very good. Let’s look into another model, like the fund in Taiwan, a private fund. This was told to us privately by many executives and also collectively. But they never showed a concrete plan,” she said. For her, the fund amounted to a tactic to derail the debate.
Canada passed the Online News Act in 2023, and Indonesia’s Publisher’s Rights Directive was implemented in February 2024. But Brazil’s Fake News Bill was killed, California’s CJPA was abandoned in 2024 as was the federal U.S. journalism compensation law introduced by Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and Republican Sen. John Kennedy after pressure and offers by Google and Meta to fund newsroom projects.
Media groups such as News Corp in Australia, Grupo Globo in Brazil and Postmedia in Canada have major channels through which to influence politicians and public opinion.
In Canada, for example, major newspapers represented by News Media Canada published a blank front page in 2021 with the caption “imagine if the news wasn’t there,” in an effort to encourage lawmakers to legislate Big Tech companies to pay for news content before Canada’s bargaining law was formally tabled. In Brazil, ahead of the vote, TV Globo held a pro-regulation discussion panel in a University in Rio de Janeiro with several Supreme Court Justices, the Justice Minister and the president of the Chamber of Deputies.
But tech companies can exert pressure through their control of the online environment. Google search’s dominance means that threats to block news links from results, as one example, could present a serious threat to publishers.
In Brazil and Canada, the bills became controversial. Critics, from think tanks to civil society groups, pundits, YouTube influencers and academics started to decry the bills as cash grabs and “link taxes.”
One of the most effective arguments against bargaining codes was that they would harm small outlets.
After the passing of Australia’s bargaining code, tech representatives said the law disproportionately benefited the country’s biggest and richest media company, namely, News Corp Australia, whose conglomerate parent company, formerly run by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owns Fox News, New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and the U.K.’s Sun newspaper.
News Corp was a major proponent of the Australian code and lobbied to get it passed. The active role News Corp played in Australia’s code became a key argument for Google and Meta in other countries, where they claimed legislation only benefited the big media players.
Representatives for Google, Meta, X (formerly Twitter) and Mercado Libre, wrote in an open letter to the government of Brazil, that the bargaining code element of the Fake News Bill “could ultimately benefit only large, traditional media outlets, harming local and independent journalism, and limiting people’s access to diverse sources of information.”
They made similar arguments in Canada, Australia, Indonesia and California.
Gingras said the same in an interview: “The bargaining codes in Australia and Brazil and Canada weren’t put forward by the little guys. They were put forward by Globo, News Corp and Postmedia.”
Divide and conquer
“Back then, the narrative was that it would only benefit large outlets,” said the director of a journalism support NGO that had signed a petition asking for the bargaining code to be removed from Brazil’s fake news bill.
“We were being told this was Rupert Murdoch’s strategy and that small outlets in Australia received nothing.”
But when Brazilian media representatives met their Australian counterparts, they heard differently — in Australia, smaller outlets had banded together, and it was the bargaining code that forced Google to negotiate with them.
“We [didn’t] really know what was happening in Australia because we had no direct contact with anyone there. And everything we saw being produced — content, studies that reached us — when you looked into it, it was from an organization funded by Google,” the Brazilian executive said.
Small outlets had reason to be concerned. Large outlets had a bigger voice and a more direct line to lawmakers. News Media Canada, for example, which represents some of the largest outlets in the country, was a strong supporter of Canada’s bill and frequently lobbied on the topic.
Smaller outlets, meanwhile, didn’t have the personnel or funding to pay for a full-time lobbyist. So those Canadian outlets joined forces in a coalition called Press Forward. The group expressed concerns and requested changes to the bill to ensure larger outlets wouldn’t disproportionately benefit.
Google tried to align itself with the group, even offering to pay for a lobbyist for the outlets at a Google conference in Montreal in 2022. After considering the proposal, Press Forward ultimately decided to decline the offer.
Maria Saras-Voutsinas, president of the National Ethnic Media and Press Council of Canada (NEMPCC), said when Canada’s Online News Act was first introduced, she was concerned her members would be left out in favour of legacy media, yet again.
Her organization supports reporters and publishers of more than 75 third-language news outlets across the country, many with very few staff members.
But though they argued Canada’s bargaining bill would hurt small publishers, before the regulation, Google and Meta themselves tended to make deals with larger outlets, too.
Through its Google News Showcase program, the company signed licensing deals with 11 outlets in Canada, all of which were among the largest in the country.
Saras-Voutsinas said her group had a training deal with Meta before Canada’s Online News Act was introduced, but with no money attached. When she asked the company for funding for members, “that conversation died,” she said. “As soon as there was an ask… dead.” She said a similar thing happened with Google.
She only learned other outlets were getting lucrative grants or deals with the companies when it came out in the debate over the bill. “It makes you feel like a tiny little fish in this big sea,” she said. “Which is, unfortunately, how we felt all along the way.”
The NEMPCC ended up partnering with News Media Canada to argue for the passage of the bill.
The same happened in Australia. “It was a fight like David and Goliath,” says Nelson Yap, co-chair of the Public Interest Publishers Alliance, which represents small news outlets all over the country.
“We needed to put together an association to be able to get deals. We cannot pay lobbyists, but we are 24 media [outlets] and represent part of the community.” To add pressure, the publishers had senators writing letters on their behalf to Google and Facebook. It was only after a lot of pressure that all members got deals.
Building Relationships
In May 2023, Google held its Newsgeist “unconference” in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Led by GNI, Newsgeist is an invite-only conference that brings tech and media representatives together. Lawmakers in the country had halted voting on the Fake News Bill just days earlier and the law was hanging in the air.
Journalists from small and large media organizations mingled, discussing the future of news in Brazil between five-minute lightning talks, games of werewolf and snack breaks.
On the agenda, which is freely proposed by participants, there were some sessions about the bill. But the program began with digital outlet owner Paula Miraglia, founder of Think Tank Momentum, criticizing Google for turning citizens against the Fake News law.
“It’s incompatible to claim you stand with journalism, if you have such heavy interference in a country’s legislative and regulatory process. You can’t have it both ways,” she said. “In the future, we’ll look back and see tech companies causing damage on par with oil, alcohol, and weapons companies—harm just as severe. And those industries, for better or worse, were at least minimally regulated at some point.”
The next day, Google met privately with representatives of Ajor, the country’s largest digital news association. Attendees say the association – which received a large part of its funding from Google and other major tech companies – had been pressured to oppose the bargaining code proposed by the bill and, instead, to champion a private fund set up by Google.
After the association decided to advocate for regulation, its funding was progressively reduced, according to inside sources.
This investigation found that often where there was a bargaining code being considered or proposed, Google organized a Newsgeist.
In May 2022, Google held a Newsgeist in Montreal, Canada, just a month before the government officially tabled Canada’s Online News Act.
The first time Newsgeist was held in Europe was in 2015, a year after Spain had passed a media compensation copyright law.
Singapore also played host to the first Newsgeist in Asia in 2019, the same year the country had tabled a fake news bill that would regulate news content on tech platforms.
“These kinds of more exclusive events that the platforms put on and some of the partnerships they developed in connection with such events are very much part of the kind of platform capture model,” says Julie Posetti, vice president of global research at the International Center for Journalists, a non-profit that supports journalists. She says these events make journalists feel like they are “insiders with relationships with the corporate actors inside these companies.”
No Newsgeist has ever been held in Australia, though Gingras did attend panels and meet and greets with digital news associations and academic institutions across the country in 2017 and 2018, ahead of the NMBC being officially tabled.
Gingras said he spent “a ton of time” in Australia as the NMBC was being crafted.
In a June 2020 Google Blog post titled “Setting the Record Straight on News”, Gingras wrote about “recent inaccurate claims about how Google works with the news industry and our value exchange with publishers.” And he pushed back against the premise of the code.
“Sending people to publishers’ news sites—not keeping them ‘walled’ up on Google products, as some claim—is a key way we provide value to the news industry. Every month we send Google users to news sites 24 billion times,” he wrote.
Strategic spending
Google and Meta have been funding newsrooms for over a decade. In 2015 — not long after Spain passed its news copyright law — the Digital News Initiative was founded for European countries.
Under Gingras’s leadership, the program later became the Google News Initiative (GNI) and it expanded globally in 2018. Google pledged to give US$300 million per year over three years to thousands of newsrooms through the GNI in 2018.
It has made a splash in the industry at a time of shrinking revenue, and it’s one of Gingras’ proudest accomplishments. “We invested huge amounts of money over eight or nine years to drive innovation. I’m very proud of that,” he told an interviewer from Harvard University’s Nieman Lab this past May.
Meta, too, has given millions of dollars to outlets through funding fact-checking and training programs since in 2016. That was before the company pivoted away from news content, taking its money with it.
But one researcher and several media industry sources say there’s more to the companies’ funding than philanthropy.
“A major factor, at least, that I attributed to this funding in these days was navigating regulatory pressure,” said Charis Papaevangelou, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam who studied patterns of Google and Meta’s funding over three years.
Papaevangelou’s research found that while Google was funding outlets across the world, the highest concentration of grant recipients in 2020 through 2022 were in the United States, Brazil and Canada, all areas that were either contemplating or actively debating bargaining codes at the time.
Google employees involved in the DNI fund reject that it was a lobbying tactic. “DNI was not a direct response to the policy heat. It was trying to understand why there was this heat and deal with the underlying issues,” said Madhav Chinnappa, who worked at Google from 2010 to 2023 and helped found the GNI. Other insiders who talked to this investigation agree.
““Google tried to play a positive role by putting money into innovation and to nurture a new generation of players and news startups to promote diversity of voices. Not necessarily to give back to the publishers or to do the right thing but to give an answer to raising criticism as the regulatory pressure became stronger,” says Ludovic Blecher, former head of the Google News Initiative Innovation division.
“But at some point it became clear that, especially in Europe, regulation would come anyway. Most of the news publishers were actually seeking a form of subsidy without any real counterpart.”
He stresses that, even when he worked as a publisher, he always disagreed that Google “destroyed our business.” “I think, if we are honest, that the publishers almost killed themselves by a lack of vision,” he said.
“I know it can sound a bit provocative but we owe Google in some way. Google has been the main provider of traffic for free. Google gave publishers the opportunity to monetize their audience — and even to transform it into valuable subscribers if only we were able to think that way from day one.”
But some researchers disagree about the goals of Google’s journalism programs. “My conclusion [is] that this was ultimately largely about trying to assuage any kind of accountability work focused on these companies and to present these companies as the benign tech actors who were friends of journalists, friends of public interest media. This was part of a strategy to influence ultimately regulators and lawmakers,” says Posetti.
The criticism is also heard within the industry. Hundreds of Indonesian newsrooms have gotten funding through GNI for journalism training and programs. But Firdaus, chairman of the Indonesian Cyber Media Union, said the training programs amount to lip service.
“But it’s better than nothing.” Firdaus said. “We’re small media… we are very poor.”
But the threat of funding being taken away is a serious concern for some outlets.
In Brazil, Google executives suggested in a blog post published just days before the Fake News Bill was voted on that if it passed, it would jeopardize the company’s deals with media outlets.
Leonardo Attuch, the owner of popular left-wing website Brazil 247, expressed concern to government officials that Google’s investments would be cut for progressive websites. He also said major outlets like Globo would be the only ones to benefit from the bargaining codes.
Attuch’s website — which was read closely by members of the government — was a vocal critic of the bill.
Questioned by this investigation, he said that the law project “serves the interests of Globo and other radio and TV companies” and had the dircct influence of these companie’s association (Abert). He says that his website “did not change one vote in Congress” and his journalists could express their opinions freely, either in favour or againts the bill.
But as copyright and regulatory challenges kept coming, Google upped its direct funding to media outlets. It introduced Google News Showcase in October 2020. CEO Sundar Pichai said the company would spend US$1 billion on news across the world through individual licensing contracts under Showcase.
By the Oct. 1 launch, 200 outlets had signed contracts, with publications from Australia, Argentina, Germany and Brazil among the first to sign on.
On Oct. 2, news broke that the company had paused the rollout in Australia, threatening to withhold funding to its Australian partners over “regulatory considerations” as the NMBC was debated.
Showcase funding was also a lobby tactic in Brazil. There, Google requested lawmakers change a clause about news compensation in the Fake News Law to accommodate existing deals with media partners.
Showcase contracts reviewed by our reporters came with some strings attached. One clause requires that both parties agree the traffic to their site provided by the Google search engine is enough payment for the content appearing in the results.
[“The traffic that Google sends to Publisher’s online properties is sufficient remuneration for Google’s indexation, display, and other similar uses of content from Publisher’s publications in connection with Google’s automated referencing services (e.g., Search and similar products and services)”.]
The company is still striking more deals. Showcase contracts are being negotiated with media in Indonesia as part of that country’s bargaining code, and in Brazil, three-year Showcase contracts are in the process of being renewed.
U.S. government influence
Days before U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled his long-awaited list of “Liberation Day” tariffs on the lawn of the White House Rose Garden on April 2, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) released a 397-page report outlining policies put in place by other countries that harm the U.S. economy.
Mentioned prominently in the USTR report were Canada’s and Australia’s news bargaining codes.
In October 2024, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Google, Meta and Amazon, submitted complaints about various countries’ tech regulation laws to the office of the USTR. The document touched on bargaining codes and other online taxation measures in dozens of countries, including Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, South Africa and Australia.
The document calls it “Forced Revenue Transfers for Digital News” and claims such laws are “unjustified governmental intervention” that “impose significant negative externalities on online services providers as well as for the broader internet ecosystem especially as the number of U.S. adults who get their news from social media continues to increase.”
“Australia’s example has spread to other jurisdictions, a recent development that warrants attention and reaction from the U.S. government before it accelerates,” concludes the report.
Since Trump’s election, the administration has been pressuring countries to back off of tech regulations that it argues unfairly target U.S. companies.
After announcing he would rescind a Digital Services Tax that would have made major digital companies pay a three per cent levy, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney hinted he was considering removing the Online News Act, as well.
Trump’s tariff threats, at least in part, delayed action on Australia’s newest iteration of its bargaining code, the News Bargaining Incentive.
The Australian government began drafting the new incentive in 2024. The proposed changes would prevent companies from being exempt from the law by refusing to run news content.
“The platforms will have a choice as to whether they pay a tax or give money to publishers — it should give the industry more security,” said Margaret Simons, director of the Melbourne University Centre for Advancing Journalism.
The announcement of the proposed new policy came several months after Meta revealed it had decided not to renew any of its deals with Australian publishers.
Google has also started pulling out of deals with publishers. In June, it announced it was cancelling 24 deals it struck related to the code after “internal review,” even though publishers were promised a five-year funding term.
But Trump’s threats of tariffs apparently delayed the new incentive out of “caution on any pronouncement that could be seen as punishing U.S. firms,” according to reporting by The Sydney Morning Herald.
New records obtained by this investigation from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade shows the country’s ambassador to the U.S., Kevin Rudd, met with the tech giants to discuss the new incentive multiple times in March 2025.
Internal emails obtained by this investigation also show Meta’s top lobbyists in Australia, Cheryl Seeto and Mia Garlick, met with staff in then-assistant treasurer Stephen Jones’ office in Canberra about the new incentive in March, weeks before the Labor government began campaigning for re-election.
Multiple media sources have said the government, which was elected for another three-year term in May, maintained privately it’s committed to pressing ahead with the incentive.
Australia’s then-communications minister told this investigation ahead of the election that the government would continue working towards implementing the incentive despite trade threats. “This is a government that engages with our closest and dearest ally, irrespective of which administration may be in the White House, and we will continue to do that,” said Michelle Rowland, who has since been appointed Australia’s attorney-general, said.
“We’ve made it very clear, for example, to the US we made it clear publicly that that’s not on the table,” he said.
A consultation paper on the news bargaining incentive, the proposed follow-up to the code, was promised in the first half of 2025, but has so far not been released.
Indonesia’s government issued its Presidential Regulation on Publishers’ Rights in 2024 and enacted it in February. The bill governs the relationship between publishers and digital platforms to support quality journalism in the digital world.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Indonesia met with the country’s Ministry of Communications to discuss the law before it was signed in 2024. This followed other meetings involving regulations on digital platform companies by U.S. government-aligned organizations that advanced American interests in the region.
The threat: ‘With one click they could make it disappear’
“If I could go back in time and have $0 from [the Online News Act] and have Meta back in the industry, I would prefer that,” said Jeff Elgie, CEO of Village Media, a company that owns 33 local news sites across Ontario, Canada.
Elgie was one of the most vocal critics of the bargaining law during the legislative process. He also has a close relationship with Gingras. Elgie continues to argue that C-18 is a damaging law. He says his opposition to the law has nothing to do with his relationship with Google or Gingras.
After Canada passed its Online News Act in June 2023, Meta said it would block news on its platforms to avoid being subject to the regulations.
Since early August of that year, Canadians trying to access news content on Facebook or Instagram have seen a blank screen and be told that “in response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be viewed in Canada” – linking it to regulation and not the platform’s corporate decision.
As a direct result of the ban, Canadian outlets reported a 43 per cent decline in social media engagement.
“In the future, we hope the Canadian government will recognize the value we already provide the news industry and consider a policy response that upholds the principles of a free and open internet,” said Meta’s top lobbyist in Canada, Rachel Curran, in a statement about the company’s decision to block news on Aug. 1, 2023.
Meta had made a similar threat before.
In Australia, Meta blocked news links on Facebook and Instagram for five days during NMBC negotiations, causing traffic to the country’s news websites to temporarily drop by 13 per cent. But after winning concessions from the government, Meta reinstated news content.
In the U.S., Senate lawmakers had plans to include the federal Journalism Compensation and Preservation Act in a 2022 spending bill, but backed off after Meta threatened to block news if it passed. The company did the same in California in 2024 when the state was considering the CJPA.
Meta made similar threats in Indonesia in 2023. Director of Public Policy for Meta in Southeast Asia, Rafael Frankel, stated that Meta would “reluctantly” have to apply the same policy in Indonesia as it did in Canada. And in Brazil, though it never made public threats, internal sources from Meta reported the company decided it would do the same.
The move has had real world consequences. Even a short-term block in Australia led to some people missing vital information about COVID-19 and natural disasters.
In Canada’s Northwest Territories, where many people rely on Facebook for news, people were missing crucial information about the spread of wildfires in 2023, during one of the territory’s most destructive fire seasons on record.
Google, too, made threats to pull the news. It ran short-term news blocking “tests” while bargaining bills were being debated in Canada, Australia, Europe and the U.S., to “assess” how a permanent de-indexing of news content might affect traffic.
Wahyu Dhyatmika, head of the Indonesian Cyber Media Association, said he was told by a Google representative how easy it would be to de-index news in the region. “It’s just with one click of a button,” he said. “They recorded all the URLs that [have] news in them, I believe they had about 3,000 or 4,000 URLs, and with one click they could de-index and make it disappear.”
However, after years of threatening to pull off news content, Google has never fully done so, “because we never had to” , says Gingras.
Chinnappa said Google’s pledges to pull out of a country should not be seen as threats, but as an example of Google following the law. “Google does try to obey the laws in every single country it operates in,” he said, “if the laws are too onerous, then it won’t operate.”
Gingras agreed. “If you’re basically saying we have to pay for every link when there’s no money on the back end of a news query, then we’re going to use less links.”
Google, Chinnappa said, “never wants to pull out of a country, particularly a democratic country.”
In Spain in 2014, the only country where Google stopped offering its dedicated Google News service, digital publishers initially saw a significant drop in traffic, but later study revealed only four to five per cent of Spanish outlets’ external traffic came from Google News.
Four years ago, Spain’s copyright law changed and Google News was restored. Showcase was re-launched in the country in short order and many digital outlets cheered its return.
Internal documents reviewed by this investigation show Google planned to block links to news in Canada after the Online News Act passed, too.
“We have been clear that unworkable legislation could lead to changes that affect the availability of news on Google’s products in Canada,” Google’s in-house legal counsel Kent Walker wrote to Canada’s then-heritage minister in an email dated June 23, 2023 — a day after the law passed.
The company eventually backed down from de-indexing Canadian news after it was allowed to negotiate a deal exempting it from the law.
The company promised to spend US$73 million per year for five years to support journalism in Canada. Google chose the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC) to distribute the funds, a new organization formed just a month before Google selected it.
The collective was formed by some of the strongest critics of the Online News Act, such as Erin Millar, CEO and co-founder of Indiegraf, an organization aimed at supporting news startups, and Village Media’s Elgie. Both had prior professional relationships with Google or Gingras, and both had received significant amounts of funding from the company. This past winter, Gingras was named chair of Village Media’s board.
Rewriting the narrative
Both Meta and Google argue the news is virtually worthless to them.
“News queries on Google’s search is less than two per cent of overall queries,” Gingras told a room of Canadian Senators in 2023. “The amount of revenue that we earn directly from news on our products is even less than that.”
Meta claims news represents three per cent of the content on Facebook.
Earlier this year, when Google tried blocking news for one per cent of users in Europe for two and a half months, it reported no change to its revenue and a less than one per cent drop in search engine use.
But the numbers vary widely depending on who’s counting. A recent study by Swiss economic consulting firm FehrAdvice found the inclusion of journalism in search results helps contribute to the topicality, trust and completeness of Google’s offerings in Germany. It concluded that on average, journalistic content increases Google’s value by 24 per cent. A previous study from the same company found that in Switzerland, the perceived value of search increased with the insertion of news by 16 per cent.
Google’s news team believes the company is a net positive for the digital media industry. “We’re willing to do more [for the news] than it provides to us,” Gingras told Canadian Senators in 2023. He implored lawmakers to recognize “the value we do provide, both in terms of traffic and the many other means that we have used to provide support to the news industry in Canada.”
But while the company may not make money directly from advertising on news inquiries, journalism likely has more value for Google than it’s letting on. Complete, accurate information is “much more important to the product and to the value proposition of Google than of Meta,” said Sophia Crabbe-Field, a researcher with McGill University’s Centre for Democracy and Free Expression.
By cutting out journalism, Google would be creating a significant gap in information for its search products.
Nonetheless, in many countries, debate around the bills shifted from online advertising monopolies to the defence that regulation could pose a threat to free expression and cause censorship.
“It shows how successful Big Tech can be in creating these narratives,” said Crabbe-Field, who wrote a 144-page report about the Online News Act and its fallout.
“Big Tech companies want to portray themselves as the purveyors of free web,” she said. “They don’t necessarily have our democratic interest and our freedom top of mind in how they behave.”
In Brazil, the free expression argument took off around the Fake News Bill, says Reporters Without Borders’ Latin American director, Artur Romeu.
“The campaign orchestrated between Big Tech companies and factions of the Brazilian far right not only aimed to suspend the vote on the Fake News bill, but also intensified recurring attacks on journalism,” he said.
Right wing influencers aligned with former president Jair Bolsonaro accused media companies of wanting to “suckle on public money,” and censor their free expression.
Bolsonaro himself has regularly attacked the media and Conservative and Evangelical groups in the country were central to bringing the bill down. The main focus of these attacks was Grupo Globo, the largest media group in Latin America.
Bolsonaro used to hold plaques saying “Globo trash,” a hashtag that was associated with the loudest days of social campaigning against the bill, according to findings by Netlab, a research group in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. And Bolsonaro himself shared an op-ed by Google’s president in Brazil, Fabio Coelho, criticizing the bill. “Is Globo behind it?” he asked his closest allies who are in a hand-pickeda WatsApp list, according to site Crusoé.
Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, who is also a congressman, claimed the “extreme press” wanted the bill to pass because it “hated” the internet. He used his YouTube channel to call the bill the “Censorship Bill,” and repeated claims the law would only benefit big players like Globo.
“While pointing to an alleged ‘corporate bias’ in the media, they were actually seeking to protect the platforms’ own commercial interests, which are in clear conflict with the public interest,” Romeu said. A narrative that he said “not only weaponizes diffuse hatred toward the press as a political strategy but also deepens it in society.”
The future value of news
Bills and legal challenges across the world continue to be tabled as countries try to address imbalances between news and platforms in the online space.
On June 20, the Swiss Federal Council proposed to change that country’s copyright law to require tech platforms to compensate publications for journalistic content displayed on their sites, while attempting to prevent companies from pulling out of the news business.
Moreover, the value of news for technology platforms may be changing as companies race to create more and more sophisticated AI systems.
Models need to be trained on large volumes of quality data. Verified information, the type that trusted media outlets create, provides that.
AI companies from OpenAI to Perplexity and Amazon have already started striking licensing deals with well-known news brands like The Guardian and The New York Times for paywalled, or archived content.
As Australia embarks on the legislative process for its updated bargaining incentive, publishers and policymakers are gearing up for a bigger fight than they faced in 2021.
“AI needs to be looked at as part of the discussion to shape the legislation, because those models are scraping our unique content and monetising it, and we want a share of that,” president of the publishers’ bargaining alliance Country Press Australia Andrew Schreyer said in an interview.
Other jurisdictions also have AI on their radar. Indonesian news outlets are optimistic that the 2024 regulation which requires platforms and publishers to negotiate, will be a way in for future AI deals and could generate new business for the publishing industry.
Brazil has also passed an AI law in the Senate, including payments for use of journalism and artistic content in AI, but the law has yet to be voted on in the House of Deputies, where it is already facing opposition. There, the failed struggle to pass a bargaining code left a legacy, according to Ajor lobbyist Carla Egydio. “This situation with the Fake News law opened the possibility of a dialogue. The field today engages in more dialogue than it did back in 2023. And I believe that’s a very positive outcome.”
Canada’s Online News Act applies to platforms of a certain size that “make news content available.” Internal documents show the federal government considered whether AI chat bots would be included under the act, though the government has not made any moves to implement that element of the bill.
On Aug. 6, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that executives from some of Australia’s top news outlets had lobbied the government to rein in AI firms training their models on news content. The news broke after a government-aligned think tank proposed those firms should be granted a copyright exemption for data mining purposes. According to the report, the outlets were considering asking the government to help them strike commercial deals with AI firms once the incentive scheme was finalized.
In Denmark, the Danish Press Publications’ Collective Management Organization (DPCMO), has been negotiating deals with social media and AI platforms from Google to ProRata.ai, one-by-one. In July, DPCMO announced it would launch legal action against ChatGPT parent company OpenAI. Just a week earlier, it said it would be considering litigation over copyright claims for news content posted on LinkedIn.
With the many of the country’s news ecosystem on board, publishers can push for deals that benefit all outlets to establish “a fair, efficient market that encourages innovation, creativity, investment, and the creation of new content,” as was promised by the Danish government as it assumed the EU presidency earlier this year.
Anya Schiffrin, director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, says the battle for compensation is not over. She noted that some lawmakers are debating inserting a ” must-carry” dispositive in future bargaining laws to prevent social media from removing news content to avoid regulation.
“There’s still lots of other ideas, like tax credits for news, tax credits for local advertising,” she says. Ideally, the platforms would have agreed to pay. “The best would have been to have decent platforms. The second best would have been for them to pay for news and carry the news. Looking at must-carry is like the fourth-best option. But that’s where we’re at,” she said.
As for Gingras, since he left Google earlier this year he became a champion of local news, joining the board of Village Media.
He also hasn’t stopped debating news-related legislation. He is a cofoudnder of a think-tank called the Center for News, Technology and Innovation (CNTI), which received a US$2.5 million grant from Google upon its foundation. CNTI published an in-depth analysis of proposed policies to to fund journalism in 30 countries, as well as reports abut the use of AI and journalism safety.
He told this investigation he believes “public policy relating to the press is always a dangerous thing,” because governments “want to control their information ecosystems” .
“Even the good governments”, he says.
PayPal 
