Google to News Publishers: Drop Dead

I’m Alan Chapell. I’ve been working at the intersection of privacy, competition, advertising and music for decades and I’m now writing for The Monopoly Report. If you have a tip to share in confidence, find me on Twitter or Bluesky.

Our latest Monopoly Report podcast is out with Rich Caccappolo of DMG. We talk mostly about publishers’ approach to monetization when it comes to use of their content for AI.  

A little bit of history repeating?

New York City in the mid-1970’s and 80’s would be almost unrecognizable to anyone who lives here today. At the ripe old age of ten, I remember getting separated from my dad and spent an hour walking around 8th avenue and 47th by myself - and wondering why every store had a “going out of business” sign on their front window. And that was the LEAST of what I saw.

Yeah, there was some wild stuff going on in that hood back in the day. But I digress...

In 1975, President Ford refused to provide Federal assistance to bolster a struggling New York City. And a NY Tabloid responded with the “Drop Dead” reference on its front page. And ultimately, that policy decision probably cost Gerald Ford the 1976 U.S. Presidential Election - as Jimmy Carter narrowly took NY State.

Is Google essentially saying drop dead to news publishers today?

Google’s EU News Publisher Experiment

You may remember that in November of 2024, Google announced it was conducting an experiment in Europe in order to understand the the effect of news content in Search on peoples’ use of Google’s products. The test included some of my favorite EU vacation spots: Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, and Croatia.

On March 21, 2025 Google published the results of the experiment - which claimed that people visited Google only slightly less often when news content was removed from Search results - and that Google’s ad revenue did not significantly change as a result of news content being removed from those results. Some press outlets have characterized Google’s findings as Google’s demonstration that news publishers need Google more than Google needs news publishers.

I view it as more akin to a breakup letter.

The reason I think the Ford analogy is apt is that President Ford seemingly forgot how valuable an economic engine NYC had been and could be. Similarly, Google seems to have forgotten how its economic engine has long been driven by publishers. I know this is a lifetime ago, but Sergey Brin made clear how valuable publishers were to Google in a 2009 discussion at the Google I/O developers conference. Some of us believe that Brin’s sentiment rings just as true today. Unfortunately, it seems that few of the people who believe in the value of pubs are running things at Google in 2025.

The Art of the Deal

On some level, Google’s experiment is simply part of a larger negotiating strategy. The EU Copyright Directive (2019) requires that Google and other tech platforms compensate publishers for using their content for anything other than 'very short snippets'.

And it’s not just Europe. Google (and in fairness, Meta) are under pressure in Canada, Australia, and other places – where publishers (and in particular, News Pubs) are seeking compensation pertaining to Google’s use of their content (and in particular, where news sources are repurposed).

In that light, you don’t need to squint your eyes to see an attempt to devalue news content in order to reduce any required payments.

Regardless of what you might think of Google’s methodology in this experiment, its timing is at best curious given the impact of AI Overlays and HCU’s over the past 18 months - as Google seemingly attempts to dis-intermediate publishers. Metaphorically speaking, claiming that a building is now uninhabitable when you’re the one who set fire to it is an odd choice.

But if you place all of this within the broader context of the headwinds currently facing AI, maybe Google’s strategy makes a bit more sense.

Intellectual Property and Section 230 of the CDA

I’ve previously stated that privacy laws / frameworks as currently construed are not designed to address the challenges presented by artificial intelligence - particularly when it comes to the data required to train LLMs. This may sound odd coming from a privacy lawyer, but I’m not at all convinced that privacy will ultimately derail the AI land grab that is currently underway. The much larger risks will come from one of the below:

• Intellection Property - i.e., does big tech need to pay for content used to train LLMs. And if so, how much?

• Section 230 - At what point is the OUTPUT of all this ingested content no longer protected by Section 230 liability shield? (See TMR pod with Eric Goldman for background info.)

In my view, the future of the digital media space over the next five years depends on how those two questions are ultimately answered. It’s not that the discussions about curation and brand safety aren’t important, but they may be seen more as deck chairs on the Titanic in a few years if you ask me….

Back to Google’s Experiment - was this trip really necessary?

As I’ve noted repeatedly, Google has for a long time been really smart when dealing with public policy issues. They get away with a fair amount of gaslighting in part because they usually know where the line is drawn. But here, I find myself confused. Maybe I’m missing something, but there are a few things that come to mind as I ponder the implications of Google’s EU news experiment:

1. Providing evidence that you can degrade your service without an impact on revenue undercuts any claim that you’re not a monopolist. Maybe that ship has sailed(?) But my goodness, now might not be the best time to provide an example of how powerful you’ve become.

2. Demonstrating how easy it is for you to track individual Users across your services to make your point about news publishers sort of undercuts your credibility on privacy given that most of the tracking capabilities outlined in this experiment aren’t impacted by TPC deprecation.

3. Measuring the short-term impact of something on a tiny subsegment ignores its longer term impact on society as a whole. Put another way - claims that journalism isn’t valuable makes one sound like the crazy uncle that nobody wants to invite to Thanksgiving.

    

4. You’re showing a viable path to tyranny as Governments everywhere think: “Wait, Google can just turn off the news?”

So yeah, this experiment may serve as a data point in the negotiation with publishers and other content creators. But I think Google will be hard pressed to find many publishers, regulators or policymakers who view it as a credible data point.

And the long-term downside risk strikes me as much more significant than any short-term gain.

Speaking of research, here’s something on the browser market

One of the rationale used to justify Google’s deprecation of third-party cookies is that Chrome felt the need to compete on privacy - and that their failure to deprecate the TPC would cause Chrome to lose market share.

If that were true, you’d expect to see their market share decline over the past five years as a result of their failure to deprecate - and the market share of Brave, Safari and Mozilla to increase.

But if you look at the worldwide browser market over the past six years (i.e., since the announcement of the Privacy Sandbox), the market share of Chrome and other browsers has been remarkably steady. (See chart below from StatCounter.)

Perhaps there’s more to this whole browser’s competing on privacy stuff than meets the eye.