Turkey is preparing to meet Google representatives to discuss digital copyright matters, in the hope to strike a deal similar to the ones that the U.S. multinational tech giant has recently agreed on in several European countries.
News publishers, among Google’s fiercest critics, have long urged governments to ensure online platforms pay fair remuneration for their content.
The organizations have been losing ad revenue to online aggregators such as Google and Facebook and have complained for years about the tech companies using stories in search results or other features without payment.
Google last month announced it had agreed to pay over 300 publishers in Europe for their news, in its latest effort to comply with a recently introduced European Union copyright law.
It struck licensing deals with national, local and specialist news publications in Germany, France, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands and Ireland.
Australia last year made such payments mandatory while Canada introduced similar legislation in April.
Google also said discussions with many others were ongoing.
The Turkish Parliament’s Digital Media Commission will be inviting Google representatives in the coming days to discuss the matter, according to Hüseyin Yaman, the chair of the Parliamentary Digital Media Commission and a deputy of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party).
The meeting could be settled as soon as this month.
"Whatever arrangements exist in Berlin, Paris and London, we want the same in Turkey," Yaman told the private broadcaster, A Haber, on Tuesday.
He said they understand the copyright demands of digital publishers and are in favor of granting them their rights.
Google representatives had attended a hearing at the commission in December and conveyed a report, Yaman told the Hürriyet daily last month.
The report said the tech giant was ready to support Turkey’s digitalization efforts and that it would be willing to cooperate to resolve the copyright issue.
European Union countries have been adopting into local law a 2019 EU directive granting publishers additional rights over their content.
The new law allows search engines like Google to link to and use snippets of news content, while giving publishers new rights when extended previews are used online.
It doesn’t, however, specify where the line between the two lies. The agreements are aimed at avoiding costly and lengthy lawsuits over that distinction.