Steve Dempsey: Contributor is billed as Google’s concession to publishers, but it has an ulterior motive – getting a cut of the paywall business

Steve Dempsey

Google has taken a lot of flak from publishers recently. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp wrote to the European Commission branding the search giant a platform for piracy. In France, Google had to stump up €60 million for a “Digital Publishing Innovation Fund” to placate publishers. In Germany, media outlets opted out of Google News earlier this year because they didn’t like how it included article snippets in news and search results – although, ...