Google tries to strongarm California into backing down on legislation to save journalism.

Sara Rubin here, thinking about how we get information. As a professional journalist, my team and I here at the Monterey County Weekly spend most of our time developing story ideas and working to understand the issues—that involves hours of talking to experts, tracking down and reading documents, attending public meetings and listening in to conversations. Then we distill what we learn through that reporting into written stories, and publish them. 

There are a lot of hours that go into producing news stories. Once they are reported, written, edited, fact-checked and published, a story—the distillation of that upstream work—might take a reader just a few minutes to digest. It probably also takes a reader just a few seconds to find our stories. Of course, you can pick up print copies every Thursday, or visit our website (or read this newsletter) daily. Or maybe you want to know what the Salinas City Council is doing about rent control, what the projected timeline is on reopening Highway 1 to Big Sur, or who Pacific Grove’s new city manager might be. Alternatively, you can Google those things, and Google will take you to Monterey County Weekly stories about those things. 

Google disseminates the information our team—and other editorial teams like ours, at news outlets all over the state—are working hard to produce. That means more readers might see our journalism. But Google doesn’t share any of its profits with the journalists working to report, write, edit and fact-check those news stories. 

Enter California Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an East Bay Democrat. She introduced AB 886, known as the California Journalism Preservation Act, in the 2023 legislative session, and it’s still making its way through the legislative process in 2024. 

The California Journalism Preservation Act would require tech platforms to remit a payment to the media outlets that produce the content they link to that gets clicked on. (The tech industry calls it a “link tax.”) Essentially, the bill would obligate Big Tech disseminators of news to share the profits they make for disseminating it with the hardworking journalists that share the news, and would prohibit them from penalizing news producers as far as searchability.

That Big Tech opposes the CJPA is not new. But Google’s latest attempt at blackmail is. 

On Friday, April 12, Google announced that it would stop disseminating some California-produced news in California. 

“We are beginning a short-term test for a small percentage of California users,” Google’s vice president of global news partnerships, Jaffer Zladi, wrote. “The testing process involves removing links to California news websites, potentially covered by CJPA, to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience.”

In essence, that means: Google is blacking out some media.

Google is trying to persuade California’s news-reading public (and lawmakers) that we need Google to disseminate news without compensating the journalists who produce that news, otherwise the entire democratic experiment will falter. 

Ironically, Google’s strongarm tactics just prove how badly a measure like the CJPA is needed. “Google’s suppression today of California news demonstrates exactly why the California Legislature needs to pass legislation to rein in the tech colossus,” Charles F. Champion, president of the California News Publishers Association, said in a statement. (The Weekly is a member of CNPA.) 

“News publishers play a critical role in California’s democracy, providing an essential check on public—and private—abuses, and bringing truth to power. Google is leveraging its monopoly power in internet search to brazenly undermine our democracy. The fact that one company can shut down the means by which 90 percent of the public find online content in order to achieve its own political and business ends show just how much policymakers need to act, and act now. Google is not above the law, and they should not be allowed to act as if they are.”

The bill has so far received broad support in the California Assembly. State lawmakers representing Monterey County in Sacramento offered statements indicating they are prepared to stand up to Google to defend a new model that supports the journalistic efforts involved in producing reliable, credible news. 

“A thriving and robust press is core to the health of American democracy,” said Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay. “Local journalists share factual information, keeping us informed on the important issues. Harmful tactics by Big Tech to intimidate and threaten California’s media outlets is plain wrong. We cannot look away from these challenges to our democratic values.” 

State Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, shares a similar sentiment, and said he echoes State Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, who wrote: “This is clearly an abuse of power and demonstrates extraordinary hubris.” (California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, declined to comment on Google’s action.)

Here’s hoping that lawmakers do not back down, so the California Journalism Preservation Act still has a chance. 

Newsletter

Google blacks out local media. P.G.’s next top staffer. Defining Marina’s downtown.