The Swiss government has said that Internet giants, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, should pay for “Swiss-made” news stories published on their platforms, according to Swiss media outlet SWI.
The government has asked Internet giants to pay local media for “citing news.
The EU has made it mandatory for operators of search engines, social media platforms and multimedia sites to pay journalists from EU member states for the appearance of news stories written and created by them.
Google agreed last year to pay more than 300 publishers in Germany, France and four other EU member states.
According to the Swiss government’s plan, the rules for paying for content on Internet platforms should apply to all Internet companies with an average annual active user base of more than 10 percent of the Swiss population. This means that search engines, social media platforms and multimedia sites with more than 900,000 active users per year will have to pay the corresponding Swiss media and publishers for crawling content and including news.
The Swiss Federal Assembly will be consulted and consulted on the bill before September 15 this year, after which it will be voted on.
The Swiss government will set up a new fee agency to negotiate and collect fees from Internet companies on behalf of Swiss media groups and journalists.
The Swiss government says it is not yet in a position to make specific revenue estimates, as the final fees will depend on the outcome of negotiations between the fee agency and the Internet companies. But a study conducted earlier this year by Schweizer Medien, an association of German-speaking Swiss publishers, showed that Google should theoretically pay Swiss publishers at least 154 million Swiss francs (currently about RMB 1.2 billion) a year.
