Europe plans news levy on search engines

European news publishers will be given the right to levy fees on internet platforms such as Google if search engines show snippets of their stories, under radical copyright reforms being finalised by the European Commission.

The proposals, to be published in September, are aimed at diluting the power of big online operators, whose market share in areas such as search leads to unbalanced commercial negotiations between the search engine and content creators, according to officials. At the heart of the draft copyright plan, news publishers would receive “exclusive rights” to make their content available online to the public in a move that would force services such as Google News to agree terms with news organisations for showing extracts of articles. Citing dwindling revenues at news organisations, the commission warns that failure to push on with such a policy would be “prejudicial for . . . media pluralism.”