Google has agreed to pay certain publishers for their content

Google says it will pay to license content from select overseas publishers as scrutiny from US regulators mounts over its dominance over the news industry.

Just a day after reports emerged that the Justice Department was getting ready to take the “next steps” in an antitrust investigation against the search giant, Google said in a Thursday blog post that it will pay media groups in Germany, Australia and Brazil for “high-quality content for a new news experience launching later this year.”

Google has also been facing mounting scrutiny outside the US. In April, France’s competition authority ordered Google to pay French publishers for using their content while Australia has said it will force the company and Facebook to share advertising revenue with local media groups.

The program will see Google “offer to pay for free access for users to read paywalled articles on a publisher’s site,” and said that publishers that enter agreements with it will be able to “grow their audiences and open an opportunity for people to read content they might not ordinarily see.”

The new product will be available on Google News and Discover.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant has long resisted calls to pay publishers for using their content to grow user engagement on its Google News page and Google Discover feature.

Whether or not entering partnerships with some publishers will help Google in a future antitrust case remains to be seen, however. Antitrust lawyer Gregory Frank told The Post that the move has the potential to backfire if it is seen as playing kingmaker.

“This can in many ways be more dangerous,” he said. “Google News moving from being a free content aggregator to including a pay service means that it is effectively entering into the news business and leveraging its monopoly to choose winners and losers.”

“The publishers who are not paid will suffer at the hands who do get paid partnerships,” Frank added.

He noted that the timing of the announcement was likely coincidental, but said it’s possible Google moved it up to keep up with the news cycle.

Publishers that will be paid for their content are Germany’s Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit and Rheinische Post, Australian groups Schwartz Media, The Conversation and Solstice Media, and Brazil’s Diarios Associados and A Gazeta.

With Post wires