Publishers could be paid by Google and Facebook under new European Union proposal

He added that the overall objective “is to make sure that Europeans can access a wide and diverse legal offer of content, and therefore [to] strengthen cultural diversity, while ensuring that authors and other rights holders are better and more fairly protected”.

One glaring issue to the measures is that publishers are not obliged to charge platforms such as Google or Facebook for featuring their content.

It has been suggested however that member states could provide publishers with a compensation claim for uses under an exception.

The proposal will be presented in September in a public consultation.

Christian Wigand, a spokesperson for the Commission, said: “Let’s be clear: granting such rights to news publishers would not affect the way users share hyperlinks on the internet”.

The commission claimed that without intervention at European Union level, legal uncertainty in the publishing sector is expected to increase while publishers’ bargaining positions would further weaken.

But the idea has been criticised, following failure of similar efforts in Germany and Spain.

Now, as part of its latest effort to limit these companies’ influence within Europe, the USA is drafting a series of proposals that could force Google, Facebook to pay digital publishers for hosting some of their content. In Germany many publishers made the decision to simply refuse the levy, to keep traffic to their site from collapsing. “It would recognise their role as investors in content”.

Google responded by shutting down its news service in the country ahead of the policy’s introduction at the start of 2015.

But she said the size of Google would make it hard for publishers to reach a deal even with the exclusive right.