How Google Paid the Media Millions to Avoid Regulatory Pressure

This article is part of the project "The Invisible Hand of Big Tech," led by Agência Pública and El Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP), with the participation of 15 other organizations — including Tech Policy Press — from 13 countries. Read more about the project and find other articles in the series here.

In 2022, Luiz was thrilled to learn that his local newspaper in Brazil would be the recipient of a contract with one of the world’s most powerful companies.

Like in other countries around the globe, many small Brazilian news outlets were scraping funds together to make ends meet. The offer of money from a company such as Google seemed like a miracle.

“I kept thinking why they were offering me this. I said, is this all there is to it?” said the publisher, using a Brazilian saying: "Too generous a gift makes the saint suspicious."

“To be frank I cannot read English, so I signed the contract and did not read all the details,” he said. “It’s about 40 per cent of our revenue… Every month. And every first day of the month it is deposited in our account. How wonderful. It’s religiously deposited.” The outlet’s other sources of revenue are ads, donations and government money.

Luiz, whose name has been changed because of risks to funding for sharing the details of his contract, is one of at least 450 publishers across Latin America, and more than 2,000 around the globe, who have signed such a deal with Google’s News Showcase licensing program in the past five years.

Google, through the Showcase program, has committed to spending a billion dollars on news globally. In the process, critics argue, it has bred financial dependence, compelled outlets to abandon copyright claims, and possibly shielded itself from future legal claims for using journalism in its AI models. This is what was revealed by the cross-border investigation, "The Invisible Hand of Big Tech," led by Agência Pública and the Latin American Centre for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), in collaboration with 15 other organizations working in 13 countries.

In 2019, the European Union voted to pass a copyright directive that changed how the world would regulate technology and digital news for years to come.

The vote set off a regulatory chain reaction that Google has been pushing back on ever since.

After the vote, Google’s head office took the lesson that the news industry would use “all their lobbying power to get money from us,” Madhav Chinnappa, a former executive at Google News, said in an interview for this investigation. Google News Showcase was an attempt by the company “to protect ourselves and see how we handle this in the most pragmatic way,” he said.

So, with a promise to spend $1 billion on news across the globe, the program was launched on Oct. 1, 2020.

“I thought Google News Showcase would not solve the problems it was created to address — I thought it would make things worse,” Chinnappa said.

Chinnappa helped found that company’s Digital News Initiative (DNI), a program within the company that aimed at promoting innovation in the European news industry through grants and projects. It was later expanded globally and became the Google News Initiative, or GNI.

Unlike the GNI funding program, which offered support in the form of grants or training sessions, Showcase included a licensing deal, meaning the company would own some rights to use the content produced by the news outlets it had partnered with. Google blog posts suggest it was designed specifically as a way for Google to compensate outlets and avoid regulations like Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code and France’s digital copyright laws.

By the launch, 200 outlets had signed onto Google News Showcase in countries like Australia, Argentina and Brazil — where media bargaining codes were actively being discussed.

The program included a featured spot in a specialized “Showcase” page within the Google News platform. But many publishers told this investigation they have gained little to no traffic from the product.

Google Showcase marked a departure from the GNI and related programs, which were an approach aimed at investing in news innovation to an attempt to address regulatory pressure, said Ludovic Blecher, former head of GNI Innovation division. “To protect its business — and its margin — at some point, I felt that the priority became to mitigate the regulatory risks and to keep the amount to pay to publishers ‘affordable.’ So the discussion pivoted more towards the big and most influential players. I call it 'renting your enemies'.”

On the other hand, the media was unable to take advantage of the opportunity, he says. “With a more united approach, less ego and a better understanding of how Google works, the news ecosystem could have done a better job to defend and protect the future of journalism — which is more needed than ever," he said.

One Brazilian news association executive said: “Google’s programs for journalism were always a PR strategy.” But, he said, “when they got more regulatory pressure, the PR strategy changed. Showcase is the best example. It is a strategy that builds financial dependency.”

Showcase contract values shown to our reporting team range from US$25,000 annually to US$250,000 per year, with the biggest deals going to the largest outlets. The contracts will not be published as requested by the sources.

A small publisher said Google News Showcase represents 15 per cent of its revenue and is the company’s largest unique source of income. "So, 15% is super relevant. It’s a lifesaver,” he says.

Showcase has become essential for many publications. Across Latin America, a study found publications in need of funds have become increasingly reliant on the program, even though many newsroom leaders say the funding is inadequate and doesn’t deliver on the promise to drive traffic to their sites.

"[Newsroom leaders] told us the audience [from Showcase] was insignificant," says Juliana Colussi, professor at the Universidad Rey de España, and one of the study’s authors. "Large news outlets can still survive with subscriptions. But smaller, local media can't get as many subscriptions. So as a consequence there is a dependency [on Google Showcase].”

An Australian media executive said money from Google Showcase contracts made up about five per cent of their company's annual budget.

“If we lost it, it would hurt us — we would have to raise that money elsewhere, and we might lose a few staff members, but it’s not mission critical to our business,” the executive said.

Secrecy as a strategy

But the deals include more than just funding — and the threats to take it away. Showcase contracts also aim to ensure secrecy.

Contracts shown to our reporters include clauses that neither Google or the publisher “may make any public statement regarding this Agreement without the other’s prior written approval.” While both parties can disclose that the deal exists, neither is allowed to share the contract value or terms, even after the contract is terminated.

Carla Egydio, a lobbyist for the Brazilian Digital Journalism Association (Ajor), said Showcase is a strategic program. "In an economic sector already struggling with financial sustainability, it’s very difficult for an organization that depends on this revenue — as many in Brazil do — to support legislation without knowing whether it will bring them more or less revenue [than Showcase deals] if it passes,” she says.

Many publishers contacted for this investigation were wary of talking about the deals, fearing it would mean breaking the secrecy clause.

Nelson Yap, chairman of the Public Interest Publishers Alliance (PIPA), a coalition of 24 Australian publishers, believes that requiring non-disclosure agreements is a strategy to inhibit collaboration between publishers.

"It prevents the publishers from learning from each other. It makes it difficult to collaborate when you're bound by non-disclosure agreements so you can only talk [at a] very surface level," he says. "They know this and they adopt this as a strategy globally."

Canada introduced its Online News Act on April 5, 2022. Showcase had launched in the country six months earlier, on Oct. 27, 2021.

Witnesses who argued for Canada's bill during the legislative progress argued the law could offer more transparency during the deal making process compared to letting Google strike deals independently.

The hope was that legislating the payments between the platforms and media outlets would shed some light on how the deals happened and help all outlets negotiate better contracts.

But when the Act finally passed in June 2023, forcing Google and Meta to pay for the news on their platforms, Google ended its Showcase contracts in the country.

The move meant a significant loss for the 11 publishers who had signed deals, including some of the country’s biggest outlets like the Globe and Mail, the Winnipeg Free Press and Torstar.

Investigation in Germany

In Germany, Oliver Schmidt, head of content strategy at news licensing company Corint Media, said outlets were concerned Showcase signatories would be favored by the company’s algorithms.

The terms of the deals led Germany’s federal competition regulator, Bundeskartellamt, to launch a proceeding against Google in 2021 over concerns that the firm’s plans to integrate its News Showcase service into general searches would “squeeze out” similar services offered by other providers from the market.

“Google has responded to our concerns and implemented important adjustments to the benefit of publishers ... it will continue to be irrelevant for the ranking of the search results whether or not a publisher participates in Showcase,” Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt said after the proceedings were discontinued in 2022.

Google also changed the way it wrote contracts as a response to the proceeding, making sure “publishers will not face difficulties in asserting their general ancillary copyright,” Mundt added.

Google was forced to remove clauses stating that the traffic from Google search “is sufficient remuneration for Google’s indexation, display, and other similar uses of content from publisher’s publications in connection with Google’s automated referencing services.”

Even though the clauses were scrapped in Germany, they still appear in contracts with outlets in other countries, our investigation found.

Other clauses in the contracts state Google could terminate the deal if a law was passed to establish payment from the platforms, or if the publisher participates in or initiates a legal claim or complaint against Google.

Corint Media's Schmidt, whose group represents about a third of the media in Germany, said those termination clauses were "damaging."

"When you're Google, having like 90 per cent of the market, you're a dominant player in the market, and publishers have to rely on your platform to get clicks, to get traffic... And then you have agreements like Google News Showcase that don't allow you to take your rights and to monetize your rights," he said.

“We saw that Google News Showcase is a tool for Google to split the market," he said.

New Showcase contracts are being negotiated all the time, too.

In Indonesia, the deals are being struck as part of that country’s bargaining code. Industry players in that country had already signed such deals in 2021, three years before Indonesia’s publisher rights legislation was formally ratified. Google had negotiated to give only a part of the overall deal to these media companies until it was satisfied with the regulations being debated in Indonesia. A government official confirmed the program did not start fully. After the law passed in 2024, Google continued signing Showcase deals, including with smaller publishers.

The end in Australia

Media executives in Australia did not get "any hints" before they heard their Google contracts would no longer be renewed.

In 2022, to avoid being "designated" and face arbitration under the News Media Bargaining Code, Google negotiated deals with dozens of publishers in the country. Twenty-four of those publishers, which were associated with the Public Interest Publishers Alliance, or PIPA, had negotiated five-year contracts, which were renewable every year. Despite this, in June those deals were suddenly terminated after just three years.

One person with insight into the cancelling of the contracts said it came as a “huge surprise” to media businesses.

"There was no notice. There was no consultation. I mean, if someone has had a relationship with you for three years you would have thought they would have come to you and said 'hey, we're thinking about doing this’."

Australia, among the first countries to pass bargaining legislation, was also one of the first where Google News Showcase was introduced.

Now, five years later, the country is developing an updated version of the News Media Bargaining Code, known as the News Bargaining Incentive which will — among other changes — prevent platforms from opting out of paying by blocking news content as Meta had done in Canada in response to the country’s bargaining law.

But top of mind for Australian publishers is how the new policy will handle AI.

Could AI training be embedded in Showcase?

As companies race to develop the most intelligent machines, they need vast quantities of factual, up-to-date information. News outlets have it.

While in bargaining code negotiations, Google and Meta both argued the news had very little value for the companies because of the lack of advertising revenue they make from news queries. The rise of AI is changing that.

News content is often used to train AI models and chatbots, which then incorporate the information into the responses they provide to users. These tools don’t always provide the source of the information in their responses.

“There's absolutely no denying that news content is valuable to AI companies,” said Klaudia Jaźwińska, a researcher and journalist who leads the Tow Center’s Platforms and Publishers project at Columbia University.

She pointed to a study by MuckRack published in July which found news content showed up in nearly half of all AI chatbot responses if user queries dealt with recent events. Google's AI overviews, which are displayed in several countries where AI use is not yet regulated, always link to the source material.

Another recent study found AI summaries like the ones in Google's search results, can reduce traffic by almost 80 per cent for sites previously ranked first in a search result.

In 2023, The New York Times sued Open AI for copyright infringement for using its articles to train the company’s large language models. A judge ruled the case could go forward in March 2025.

Other AI companies and well-known news outlets – mostly in the Global North – have been striking deals, receiving payment in exchange for archived or paywalled news content that can be used for large language model training.

Nearly 150 news brands, from The Wall Street Journal to The Guardian, have either struck content and licensing deals with AI companies or are engaged in legal battles over the use of news content, according to data compiled by Jaźwińska’s project.

Open AI, ProRata and Perplexity are leading the pack with dozens of newsroom content deals or ongoing claims each.

Google, by comparison, has publicly signed just five deals according to the data. In late July, Bloomberg reported Google was in talks with about 20 news organizations to license their content for its AI tools.

But Google isn’t necessarily falling behind.

All of the Showcase contracts obtained by this investigation included an intellectual property section that gives Google the ability to “reproduce, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, and otherwise use the Publication Content in connection with Google products and services.”

Schmidt from Corint Media said the group’s members have asked Google to remove the clause or confirm it wasn’t using it as a shield for AI training. Google refused.

While it may not be the main goal of the contracts, multiple experts agreed the clause could be used to try and sign over an outlet’s rights to pursue legal claims against Google for using news content in AI development.

"If it comes to a court case, they could later say, no, we already paid the publishers for their AI training. We have this Google News Showcase agreement,” Schmidt said.

“If there's five articles per day from every publisher, and there are 100 publications in Germany who are taking part in Showcase, that’s 500 articles per day,” Schmidt said. “Multiply that with 365 days, and it's over 180,000 articles per year. So Google is getting content from over 180,000 articles per year, which they could use, and that's enough to train a language model.”

When asked about Showcase and its possible use in AI models for this investigation, Google sent a written statement: “Like many companies, we regularly engage with policymakers and others on a wide range of issues, including about how policies may affect people who use our products. We transparently report our interactions with officials in accordance with local regulations.”

One former Google executive told this investigation that it is possible the Showcase contracts could be used as a legal shield, but it is "unlikely" because tech companies have generally refused to pay for content that can be freely found online as a matter of principle. On top of that, they argue, copyright license for AI training tends to be much more specific than the language in the Showcase contracts.

Google continues to churn out deals and to renew existing ones, further cementing Google’s role in the news industry for years to come. Earlier this year, some Brazilian news outlets began re-negotiating their Showcase contracts. Luiz was among the editors happy to learn his deal with the company was to be renewed in mid-2025 for another three years.

Google has also announced it has renewed more than 50 Showcase deals with Australian publishers.

According to Julie Posetti, vice president of global research at the journalism non-profit International Center for Journalists, the AI race risks creating what she calls “platform capture 2.0.” She has watched with concern the new trend of one-to-one deals for AI training and the tendency of new companies that are leading the AI race, such as Microsoft and Open AI, to fund journalism events and training.

"With the proliferation of generative AI we're seeing the same kinds of relationships develop as though none of the lessons of platform capture 1.0 were learned," she says, explaining that the news industry's partnerships with social media platforms led to "capture, influence and self-censorship."

Big Tech's defense of public interest media, she says, was "performative.”

"It was ultimately about trying to assuage any kind of accountability work focused on these [Big Tech] companies and to present these companies as the benign tech actors who were friends of journalists,” she says.

"It's like none of those lessons seem to have been learned."

Big Tech's Invisible Hand is a cross-border, collaborative journalistic investigation led by Brazilian news organization Agência Pública and the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística (CLIP), together with Crikey (Australia), Cuestión Pública (Colombia), Daily Maverick (South Africa), El Diario AR (Argentina), El Surti (Paraguay), Factum (El Salvador), ICL (Brazil), Investigative Journalism Foundation - IJF (Canada), LaBot (Chile), LightHouse Reports (International), N+Focus (Mexico), Núcleo (Brazil), Primicias (Ecuador), Tech Policy Press (USA), and Tempo (Indonesia). Reporters Without Borders and the legal team El Veinte supported the project, and La Fábrica Memética designed the visual identity.