Google is conducting an experiment at the expense of European news websites and will no longer show results from these websites to users in Belgium and the Netherlands, among others.

Google excludes European news sites from search results for one percent of users in Belgium, the Netherlands, Croatia, France, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain. The European sites are also excluded from Google Discover and Google News.

The search giant says this is an experiment. Google wants to investigate how the inclusion of these European news sites impacts users’ search experience. During the test, international results are displayed instead of European results.

Google portrays the experiment as something regulators and publishers are asking about, but doesn’t say who exactly is asking. The test would also run temporarily, but Google doesn’t say for how long. Publishers who receive compensation from Google for the snippets the search specialist uses in its results will continue to receive their compensation as agreed during the test.

Threat or experiment?

There is something threatening about the entire setup of the experiment. Google has been at loggerheads with Europe for some time, partly due to the European Copyright Directive. Among other things, this prohibits the search giant from simply displaying integral parts of journalists’ work for free. Google has repeatedly threatened to simply ignore news websites if they become too demanding.

For many people, Google is synonymous with the Internet. In Belgium, the search giant has a monopolistic market share of 91.6 percent. If Google excludes websites from users’ results, they won’t necessarily notice unless they are aware of the experiment. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know. Google can then use the results to claim that the EU pages are not that relevant to the results in order to increase the pressure even further.

Not non-binding

The experiment is by no means non-binding for the news sites. Since Google has a monopoly position, they are dependent on the search engine for traffic and therefore revenue. Anyone who manages a website knows how important it is to optimize it for Google growth.

Google first established a market position and is now essentially running an experiment to see to what extent it can abuse it. This is not unique. In Canada, Google blocked news links for a while last year in response to a law requiring compensation for a better deal. In California (USA), the company did the same this spring in response to a proposed law with the same approach.