Google's Long Arm Over The New Zealand Government and Media and Its Bargaining Tactics Revealed - The Google Engine Series

26 March 2025. Article: Google's influence and tactics in New Zealand in the context of media and government. The New Zealand Reporter is a digital member of The NZ Media Council.

A trove of confidential letters and ministerial briefing papers show Google’s successful and lengthy campaign to stop the New Zealand Government from passing legislation and the corner this has put the governing coalition in.

Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs for Google LLC and Alphabet LLC (Source: LinkedIn profile for Kent Walker).

It also pulls back the rock to reveal Google's influence over vast swathes of New Zealand’s media, at a critical juncture for the fourth estate and during the fourth industrial revolution: the rise of artificial intelligence.

In August 2022, Google launched News Showcase in tandem with the country's largest media companies Stuff, RNZ, Scoop, NZME, “and others”.

As documents will reveal, Google’s New Showcase would provide a financial lifeline to most of the country's media.

In the years that followed, Newshub folded, 14 community newspapers are to close, and TVNZ and the NZ Herald proposed job cuts. And collective bargaining between Google and the New Publishers Association, which represents media such as Stuff and NZME, went nowhere.

In August 2023, the then Labour/Greens cabinet agreed to introduce the Fair Bargaining Digital News Bill to parliament. The bill would provide a legislative backstop that would force the likes of Google and Meta to enter negotiations a fair price for the news content that New Zealand-based media organisations create.

By 2024, Google was supporting about 90 percent of New Zealand media. In one briefing paper to Media and Communications Minister Paul Goldsmith, it was suggested that without Google, they would go bankrupt.

In August 2024, the government signaled it would make the bill law by December 2024.

But by December, the New Zealand government had put the bill on hold.

In this series, The NZR reveals the lengths that Google and its President of Global Affairs Kent Walker have gone to, to discourage the government from passing the bill and the grip it has and will continue to have over the country's supreme law-making body and media.

The New Zealand Reporter will be publishing documents - correspondence between Google and the Government, internal and external government emails, ministerial briefings and meeting notes - that detail savage negotiations between the New Zealand government and one of the most powerful companies in the world.

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