Google warns of news withdrawal over Indonesia copyright bill | Magica
Google warns of news withdrawal as platforms challenge Indonesia’s copyright bill
Editorial Team
••📖6 min read
Google warned that charging for news links would force it to stop distributing Indonesian news, while Meta and TikTok challenged other parts of the copyright bill. Existing Indonesian payment mechanisms and overseas deals complicate the platforms’ warnings about the cost to publishers.
Google warned that charges on news links would lead it to stop indexing and distributing Indonesian news to local users.
Meta argued that link restrictions could hurt small and regional publishers; TikTok sought narrower AI disclosure rules and continued liability protections.
Indonesia already has a publisher-rights framework; overseas precedents include negotiated payments as well as news blocking.
Google warned Indonesian lawmakers on November 11 that charges on news links would force it to stop indexing and distributing Indonesian news to local users. Meta and TikTok also challenged proposed copyright-law revisions that would require digital platforms to compensate publishers for displaying news content and introduce rules for AI, according to the hearing report.
The dispute links two different uses of journalism: directing readers to publishers and using protected work to develop AI. Publishers face revenue pressure from falling traffic, while platforms are resisting obligations governing payment, licensing and responsibility for content. A withdrawal could reduce readership; negotiated agreements could produce a different outcome.
Google puts news distribution on the line
Google, whose search service indexes web pages and directs users to them, presented the withdrawal warning as a consequence of charging for links. In an account of its four-part submission to parliament’s legislative body, the company argued that restricting links and snippets would obstruct access to information. That is its assessment of the proposed rules, rather than a settled consequence of legislation.
Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, made a related argument in the account of its testimony. Publishers voluntarily share links on those services to attract readers, build communities and earn advertising or subscription revenue, the company said. Meta said it neither charges publishers for sharing those links nor takes a share of the revenue publishers generate from the resulting visits.
Meta singled out Articles 29 and 30, saying they risked requiring payment for links, short previews or recommendations even when publishers share them voluntarily. It sought exemptions for links, recommendations and brief previews that do not replace the article, while maintaining copyright protection for the article itself. It warned that platform restrictions could leave small and regional outlets especially exposed to lost visits and revenue opportunities.
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Those are predictions by companies facing new obligations, rather than demonstrated effects of the proposed Indonesian rules. Yet withdrawal has a precedent: in August 2023, Meta said it had begun ending news access on Facebook and Instagram in Canada in response to the Online News Act, which required platforms to negotiate commercial deals with publishers. Canada’s government condemned that decision.
The same report describes another outcome: Google and Facebook struck deals with Australian media companies after amendments to Australia’s 2021 legislation. And Canada subsequently announced an agreement with Google in November 2023 that would preserve news access and provide C$100 million annually, indexed to inflation, for eligible Canadian news businesses. Google could distribute the money through a single collective, allocating it according to full-time-equivalent journalist numbers. These are precedents for different negotiated arrangements, not forecasts of Indonesia’s outcome.
Indonesia’s existing publisher-rights framework is set out in Presidential Regulation No. 32 of 2024. Source: Indonesian Cabinet Secretariat. Source: Indonesian Cabinet Secretariat.
Indonesia already has payment mechanisms
Indonesia’s starting point is Presidential Regulation No. 32 of 2024, the publisher-rights framework covering digital-platform responsibilities to support quality journalism. The Cabinet Secretariat’s explanation says it covers press companies verified by the Press Council and requires cooperation through agreements that can include paid licences, revenue sharing, aggregate news-user data sharing or other agreed arrangements.
The regulation also provides for an independent committee established by the Press Council to monitor platform obligations and facilitate arbitration or alternative dispute resolution. The copyright debate therefore concerns the scope and mechanism of additional obligations in a country that already has a framework for platform-publisher cooperation.
Publishers’ dependence on referrals does not mean the existing arrangement is financially secure. In a July 29 consultation account, the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs said press companies had reported declining reader traffic affecting revenue as officials examined AI’s impact on media sustainability. The ministry relayed reports that some sites had lost about 70% of traffic, but gave no sample, measurement period or method. That figure cannot establish an industry-wide decline or how much AI caused.
Canada’s experience included Meta’s news blocking and a later agreement preserving Google’s news access. Source: Reuters via Investing.com.
Licensing and liability are also at stake
Google’s objections extended beyond news links. It urged lawmakers to preserve voluntary, market-based agreements, arguing that forcing music and news rights holders to contract through a single collective body could limit creators’ earnings and deter investment. That places the choice of negotiating mechanism alongside the question of whether platforms should pay.
The company has raised that issue before. In the ministry’s July consultation account, Google proposed retaining direct business-to-business agreements alongside licensing through a collective management organization. Its position concerns how rights holders negotiate as well as what rights the revised law creates. The Canadian agreement illustrates that Google has also accepted a framework offering collective distribution elsewhere.
On AI, Google argued that mandatory licensing would be technically unworkable for models using vast, multimodal datasets. It warned that restrictions on Indonesian training data could impair Indonesian-language fluency and create obstacles for local developers. Its preferred approach is an explicit exception for text and data mining, coupled with standard mechanisms through which rights holders could refuse AI training. The claimed technical and language consequences remain Google’s assessment.
Google also sought continued intermediary protections based on notice and action, saying platforms cannot determine every individual right attached to content or substitute for courts. TikTok similarly urged lawmakers to preserve safe-harbour protections, arguing that platforms cannot reliably establish copyright ownership or licensing status.
TikTok separately asked that disclosure requirements distinguish AI that assists a person from AI that fully creates content. It sought to exclude assistive uses from disclosure obligations, rather than oppose disclosure for all AI-generated material.
The pending choice for publishers
The revisions remain proposed. Lawmakers must decide which uses of news trigger compensation, how direct and collective licensing interact, what AI uses require permission or disclosure, and what liability remains with intermediaries. The reported company submissions establish their preferred boundaries; they do not independently establish the bill’s full legal effect.
The hearing accounts provide no payment rate or publisher-revenue estimate against which to test the withdrawal warnings. The next useful evidence is the precise compensation trigger in the proposed text and its relationship to the 2024 framework, followed by an assessment of payments and readership under the available arrangements. Small and regional publishers need both sides of that calculation before claims that the bill will help or hurt them can be evaluated.
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