BERLIN — Google’s imprint on daily life is hard to ignore in Europe, where it reportedly has 93 percent of the Internet search market, more than in the United States. Yet when it comes to its lobbying of lawmakers, Google prefers a low profile.
That all changed this week when Google fired a rare public broadside against a proposal that would force it and other online aggregators of news content to pay German newspaper and magazine publishers to display snippets of news in Web searches.
The proposed ancillary copyright law, which is to have its first reading Friday in the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, has ignited a storm of hyperbole pitting Google and local Web advocates against powerful publishers including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bild and Die Welt.
Google took off the gloves Tuesday when it opened a campaign urging German users to e-mail members of the Bundestag with their concerns. Google said the proposal would shrink the free flow of information on the Internet in Germany, perhaps even forcing it to display blank links to German references.
The issue is also being debated in other European capitals. In October, President François Hollande of France asked the Google executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, to have a representative meet with a government mediator to resolve the issue. The company complied. The implicit threat was that if no solution were found, France might pursue a legislative option.
Christoph Keese, the senior vice president of Axel Springer, publisher of Bild and Die Welt, two of the largest-circulation newspapers in Germany, said lawmakers in Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal and Spain were considering similar measures. Google said that conversely, new laws passed in Canada, and proposals that could soon be adopted in Britain and the Netherlands, would further loosen copyright restrictions and free up new kinds of Internet sharing.
The German proposal “would make it much more difficult to find the information that you seek in the Internet,” Google warned in its campaign, which it titled “Defend Your Internet.”
The unusually public salvos from Google caught many German lawmakers by surprise. Chancellor Angela Merkel raised the issue at a working dinner Tuesday with a group of lawmakers from her party, the Christian Democratic Union, including Peter Beyer, a member of the Bundestag from Ratingen, a town near Düsseldorf.
“She asked us how many e-mails we’d received and we told her,” he said Wednesday during an interview, adding that he had received fewer than 10 from Google supporters. “Most of us had only received a few, three or four. She and the rest of the C.D.U. are still behind this law. I have no doubts that it will pass.”
That may not be as simple as supporters envision.
Germany’s main technology industry association, the Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media, known as BitKom, has come out sharply against the proposal, saying it will curb investment in the German digital economy.
“They are planning a law that would be unique worldwide, which would send a negative signal to investors: Innovative online services are not desired in Germany,” said Bernhard Rohleder, chief executive of BitKom.
A letter to Bundestag members signed jointly by 16 copyright law professors, the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law, and Grur, an association representing 5,300 German copyright lawyers, warned that the law could cost Germany jobs. “There is a danger that this law will have unforeseen negative consequences,” the letter read.
By midday Wednesday, one day into the campaign, Google said that 25,000 people had signed its petition and that it expected a half-million people to have viewed its Web site.
The showdown being played out in Berlin may not be resolved by lawmakers until early next year. But it stems from a long-running dispute between Google and German newspaper and magazine publishers that dates from 2007, said Anja Pasquay, a spokeswoman for the German Association of Newspaper Publishers.
That was when publishers first decided to pursue a legislative solution after failing to persuade Google to sit down and negotiate a licensing agreement for the industry, Ms. Pasquay said.
Google Fires a Rare Public Salvo Over Aggregators
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