Good afternoon, Chair Umberg, Members of the Committee, and Assemblymember Wicks. Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.
My name is Jaffer Zaidi, and I’m Google’s Global Vice President of News Partnerships.
Since 1998, our mission has been to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. In service of that mission, every day, Search continues to send billions of visits to publisher websites, and that includes news publishers of all sizes.
Today, we’re also one of the largest supporters of journalism in the world. This includes paid licensing programs offered by our News Showcase product and the Google News Initiative, which offers funding, training, and tools specifically geared toward community-based, underrepresented, and local publications. It’s through these programs that we’re proud to support over 200 news organizations in California.
To be clear, the act of surfacing links to news content is not commercially lucrative for Google — as we rarely show any advertising against news searches. We make these investments because connecting our users to information and news about the world around them is core to our mission. And that’s why we share the goal of strengthening local journalism in California.
However, despite its good intentions, we are convinced that the California Journalism Preservation Act adopts the wrong strategy and will undoubtedly have negative effects. First, it’s built upon the flawed premise that platforms somehow appropriate news content and profit from it without compensating news businesses. That is not the way that Search works. All website owners, including publishers and news organizations, determine whether we can link to their websites and what, if anything, can be displayed in addition to those links. The bill would also break the foundational principles of the open internet, forcing platforms to pay publishers for sending valuable free traffic to them, which they choose to receive. After that, it forces platforms to display that content, which is a deeply unconstitutional and problematic idea. The bill would also heavily fund interests that are opposed to supporting actual local journalism in California, as many others have pointed out. That includes out-of-state private equity firms and hedge funds with histories of stripping newsrooms for parts, as well as global and national conglomerate publishers.
Additionally, it lacks the ability to prevent actors motivated by false information from obtaining funding. Meanwhile, it puts the full burden of support on one or two companies — while shielding many large platforms who also link to California news publishers.
This kind of framework has caused some platforms to completely remove links to news publishers in other markets, which has been devastating for smaller publishers in particular. There needs to be a better path.
We have presented our own proposal, which would support truly California-based journalism and significantly increase our contributions through specialized programs. It also calls on a broad range of stakeholders to contribute — which should be a prerequisite for any solution. We hope this can serve as the basis for a workable path forward, and remain committed to working towards that.
I’d like to close by expressing my deep appreciation to Chair Umberg, Assemblymember Wicks, Senator Glazer and all of you for your efforts to work with and listen to stakeholders.
Thank you for your time, and I look forward to your questions.
