Google Images
On Thurday 14 December, there was a meeting between Google France and a number of press publishers in France (notably Le Figaro Benchmark and Amaury groups) , representatives of the press picture agencies (notably the lawyer of the Agence France Presse) and representatives of press photo agency associations and stock photo associations.
From CEPIC/ SNAPIG Gilles Taquet (photononstop), Magali Tribalet (age fotostock) and Sylvie Fodor were present.
From Google, they were only three. Notably:
Luca Forlin (Head of strategic partnerships EMEA/ International at Google) logged in with video from from New York.
Luca has been part of all meetings so far, in France and in Germany.
Carlo d'Asaro Biondo (president of EMEA partnerships at Google)
Philippe Colombet, Head of Strategic Relationships, News and Publishers for Google
The language of the meeting was French.
Luca showed the same slides that had been showed at the video conference on 11 December. For confidential reasons, he was not willing to share them. (But they are available on the German memos as Mathias Jahn did some screenshots.)
It took some discussion to clarify that Google was not ready to go back to the previous version of Google Images in France.
Instead they are putting forward their latest developments and trying to "sell" them as fit for our purpose.
Although they do not provide any evidence, they say these new features will (might) :
- drive back traffic on websites (not in quantity but in quality)
- support the image business and the press publishers business
Further discussions brought Carlo to advance that Google might possibly "if we ask them to":
1) Suppress the Share Button
2) Suppress the right click
3) Downgrade the image in the viewer in a lower resolution
and 4) That local changes might be possible
Google is "thinking about it", asked how long they would be "thinking about it", they said they don't know, and finally admitted that if they agree to such a change at local level, any proposed change must be validated at Mountain View.
Each four point above was discussed individually and a couple of related issues were raised. Would an image downgraded in the viewer be ranked lower in Google search by Google's algorythms? Is it useful to suppress the Share Button or the Right Click at local domain level only?
On a personal note, I must say that I was struck by, on the one side, the extremely agressive ton of Carlo d'Asaro Biondo (in a "take it or leave it but don't bother us" kind of way) and on the other side his familar tone with a number of participants, which might be explained by the fact that they work together within the "fonds pour l'innovation numérique de la presse" financed by Google. Carlo, obviously, plays on division.
He opened the meeting by saying that France was not the only country where Google was in negotiations and that views might diverge. But when I asked him which countries he meant, he only mentioned Germany. I reminded that there were no divergence of views between Germany and France on the issue at stake. He also said that the press sector, the image sector and the e-commerce sector had diverging views on how images should be shown. At least, the press and the image sector were around the same table and on the same side on that day.
A follow-up meeting is scheduled on 7-8 February. That is after the follow-up meeting on 31 January in Berlin.
sf