The European Union is set to propose laws that will let publishers seek royalties from news aggregators such as Google, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper said it had seen internal documents that detailed the plan.
The plan is expected to be announced later this month by the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU.
The new rules, which would cover the whole EU, would provide publishing companies with legal certainty and bargaining power against online services that utilise their material.
{loadposition sam08}According to the WSJ, the draft proposal will give EU states the right to grant publishers additional rights over material they produce, stretching to 20 years after publication.
Such initiatives have failed in Spain and Germany. Once the EU makes a formal announcement, the European Parliament will hold a debate and the proposal is likely to be amended before becoming law. EU states will then have 12 months to adopt the proposals.
While this may once again be seen as the EU picking on American companies, with Google the biggest news aggregator in the business — as the EU's move against Apple has been interpreted — the biggest media company in the world, the US-based News Corporation, is sure to support it.
News Corporation, which owns the WSJ, filed an official complaint with the EC over Google's new search practices earlier this year. The company has claimed that Google pushes its domination of search by not showing articles from a particular publisher unless the the publisher agrees to Google copying or scraping content to display such articles in its search results.
The question of how to make a buck has dominated discussion of online publishing for a long time, with publishers resorting to paywalls of varying levels in a bid to make their businesses profitable.
But the only victors in the game have been Google and Facebook, with the two companies accounting for more than half of online advertising, according to the most recent figures.