Google to pay publisher $1 billion over the next three years for the news content

London : Tech giant Google is taking every possible step to increase its dominance on the news industry. Google will pay publishers $1 billion over the next three years for their content. It has signed agreements for its news partnership program with nearly 200 publications in Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the UK and Australia, said google on Thursday.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post, “This financial commitment is biggest to date; we will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience,”

Google’s News Showcase is launching in Brazil and Germany, featuring story panels that let publisher’s package stories with features like timelines. It will first appear on

Google New

 on Android then Apple iOS, then on Google search.

The partner publications of the company are Germany’s Der Spiegel and Stern and Brazil’s Folha de S Paulo. Google will soon focus on other features like video, audio and daily briefing. Pichai said Google is working to expand the program to other countries, namely India, Belgium and the Netherlands.

News companies want Google, and its Silicon Valley rival Facebook, to pay for the news content that they ship from commercial media while taking the lion’s share of ad revenue. However, the European Publishers Council said it’s an attempt by Google to stave off legislation and government action to get them to negotiate. “It is a way to get out of negotiations in the name helping to fund news production”, Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the council. The council includes German publisher Axel Springer and the Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, they have been fighting a year’s long battle to get the tech giants to pay for news stories uploaded on the platforms.

Many countries are applying pressure on Google and Facebook for compensation. Australia’s government is drafting a law to make Facebook and Google pay the country’s media companies for the news content. In response, Facebook threatened to block Australian news content rather than pay for it. France has taken similar stand but Google has refused to show snippets of some stories as it fights government demands for license fees to publishers.

Facebook last year said that it was investing $300 million over three years in news initiatives, with a focus on local news partnerships and third-party fact-checking. It will pay US news companies including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today for their headlines.