The Managing Director of Google U.K. told a House of Commons committee on Thursday that his organization is not a parasitical one, in the business of stealing content from publishers, but is more like a virtual newsagent or newsstand.
Matt Brittin, appointed MD of U.S.-based Google's U.K. operation earlier in the year, was speaking to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee at the House of Commons, the U.K.'s parliament's lower house, when he made his claim in response to remarks made by committee Chairman John Whittingdale.
According to the
Telegraph, as the committee was discussing what kind of future there might be for local and regional media, Mr Whittigdale, a member of the Conservative Party who was first elected to Parliament in 1992, told Mr Brittin that he and his colleagues had heard from the newspaper industry that it did not consider Google a "great benefactor", believing instead that it was more of a parasite stealing the content the newspapers had produced.
In the same week that Google announced it would be giving publishers the ability to
limit the number of free articles people can view on their websites, after having accessed the websites via the Google search engine, Mr Brittin responded in the following manner:
I've read in newspapers, oddly enough, some of the comments that have been made about parasites. I want to make one thing incredibly clear - we do not steal content. It's wrong to paint us as stealing content. We are, if you like, a virtual newsagent. You come to Google News, you find the stories you're interested in, you go through to the website. The amount of traffic that comes from us is equivalent to about 100,000 clicks a minute to news publishers' websites. We provide links, we provide distribution. In a physical newsagent's, newspapers will pay the newsagent to have their newspapers in the shop. We don't charge anybody for this service, this is a free service
Emphasizing that Google always complied with copyright law, linking readers who had seen small extracts from an article to the site where the full story could be found, Mr Brittin added that his company did not make vast amounts of money as a result of the content on its search engine pages and did not take advertising away from the print media.
He also noted that despite many publishers reportedly being angry with Google and its mode of operation, News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch has made clear his displeasure in that respect, they had not opted out of Google searches, as is their right.
When asked if he thought Mr Murdoch was pleased with Google's decision to give publishers a facility to limit the number of free articles Internet users can view he stated that he had "no idea" what the publisher of titles such as
The Wall Street Journal and
The Times might be thinking.
Journalism.co.uk reports that Mr Brittin, who estimates that four billion clicks per month are "delivered" by Google to publishers and those organizations producing news, also spoke of how he expected subscription news services to increase in the future, something he believes is a "good thing".
The same website says that Johnston Press, the regional publisher in the U.K. whose experiment with charging readers a fee to view the content on six of its websites, a concept known as a paywall, was covered recently by
Digital Journal, attracted praise from Mr Brittin.
Nevertheless Google's most senior employee in the U.K. anticipated that a considerable amount of content on the Internet would remain free of any charge.
Acknowledging the difficulties newspapers were having in attracting advertising in the current economic climate and the threat posed to them by the Internet Mr Brittin stated his belief that the local media could still enjoy "a sustainable and successful future". The
Telegraph quotes him as saying:
The newspaper is a format that I think will continue to exist. It beats online in a number of respects. You can flick through things, you can find things easily, it's a nice assortment of stories and content, including advertising that's relevant to you if you buy the newspaper that suits your needs and I think that format will persist. I think the economics will change but I also think it won't just be about newspapers. One of the great opportunities for local media is the internet. It changes the costs of distribution completely
