Showcase payments were a response by Google to threat of being forced to pay for news in Australia and the EU, he said. The AI deals are an attempt to “buy some friends” as Google is accused by regulators in the UK and elsewhere of abusing its monopoly power to secure access to content to feed its AI models.

“I think what they were trying to do then, and they’re probably trying to do now, is to get what they need without putting a direct monetary value to the content licensing…

“They’re trying to bundle rights into larger deals because if they had to pay everybody for licensing their content, then that affects their margins in a material way.”

Asked what his advice is for publishers offered a Google AI deal, Kint said: “The results of a handful of publishers doing deals is still going to leave us with what Google is doing right now, which is abusing its market power and destroying the broader open web in the process by not creating real incentives for the content companies that it’s built much of its business off of over the last two decades.”