Search engines vs. EU – Spectacular backfire.

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Content regulation that can only spectacularly backfire. 

• The EU’s latest proposal to allow media outlets to charge search engines to index their content is a frightening sign of how the EU has the potential to damage the Internet experience for all EU users.
• The idea is to change EU copyright law such that the owners of content indexed by search engines will be able to charge the search engines a fee for doing so.
• The problem here is simple:
• The owners of the content derive far more benefit from having their content indexed than the search engines do.
• Consequently, when the search engines stop indexing their content, as a result of having to pay for it, content owners will see the traffic to their content plummet and their advertising revenue with it.
• The net result is likely to be that content owners quickly re-adjust their pricing to zero and this storm in a teacup will quickly be consigned to the scrapheap of EU regulations that don’t work.
• The strange thing is that this has already been tried in Germany where the impact on Axel Springer’s traffic was so severe that it had to scrap the levy.
• It has also been tried in Spain where Google responded by closing down its news service, making it more difficult for users to find the news stories they were interested in.
• The EU proposal notes these failures but hopes that an EU wide harmonisation of this regulation will somehow make a difference.
• The worrying thing here is not the proposal itself, as I think this will disappear without a trace, but the fact that EU thinks that it might work.
• This demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of how the Internet works and increases my concerns that the EU will eventually regulate some other area of the Internet with much more serious consequences.
• What the EU fails to understand is that it is the user that is in the driving seat not the commission itself.
• Almost every session on the Internet, that is not an app, begins with a web search because that is the easiest way for users to find what they want.
• The EU is supposed to be concerned with the best interest of EU-based Internet users but as far as I can see, this will achieve nothing other than to damage their Internet experience.
• With regards to the investigation into Google’s practices with Android, I think that the EU is doing a much better job (see here) but in this case it is in the interest of users to leave this well alone.