[HN Gopher] French news sites prevail in negotiations with Googl...
___________________________________________________________________
French news sites prevail in negotiations with Google over
"neighboring rights"
Author : pseudolus
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-01-22 09:38 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| creata wrote:
| What makes news sites so special that they, unlike every other
| website, get to charge Google when they are indexed, and more
| shockingly, that they can _compel_ Google to index them?
| kevingadd wrote:
| FTA: 'In 2019, Google announced it was going to stop displaying
| "snippets" from French news articles in search results. Google
| believed that showing only news story headlines, not brief
| excerpts from articles, would bring it into compliance with the
| new law.'
|
| The problem is that they were going beyond indexing: they were
| lifting content from the article wholesale and embedding it
| into search results (without permission).
|
| They do this with all sorts of other stuff too, news sites
| aren't the only ones who get irritated by it.
| rognjen wrote:
| > lifting content from the article wholesale
|
| From your quote:
|
| > brief excerpts
| kevingadd wrote:
| brief excerpts are content, my friend. If they weren't,
| readers wouldn't care about them and Google would have no
| reason to go through the trouble of scraping them and
| inserting them into search results.
| rognjen wrote:
| Excerpts are definitely content. They're definitely not
| wholesale.
| jasode wrote:
| _> The problem is that they were going beyond indexing: they
| were lifting content from the article wholesale and embedding
| it into search results (without permission)._
|
| Yes, but your full quoted text further explains that even
| _just linking the headlines _without_ the snippets_ was still
| not in compliance.
|
| We have 30+ years of the world wide web being built on
| referred url links (no snippets) without monetary payment but
| now French news organizations want compensation for it. I
| don't understand that logic. They get extra visibility +
| traffic clicks from Google but also want to be paid for it?!?
|
| If after a Apple WWDC event, the front page of HN is filled
| with url links to Apple press releases and announcements, it
| doesn't mean HN should _pay_ money to Apple Inc to send
| eyeballs to "apple.com". Linking to other urls (for free) is
| how the web works.
|
| IMO, removing the embedded snippets should have been enough.
| tpxl wrote:
| > they were lifting content from the article wholesale and
| embedding it into search results
|
| How is this not straight up copyright infringement? Or have
| the sites agreed to it and are now just being whiny babies?
| dontblink wrote:
| The latter. It's ridiculous. I wish Google had not caved.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| The sites always had an opt-out of being scraped, via
| robots.txt. Google made a special-case change for French
| news sites where they stopped showing snippets, and just
| showed URLs (still opt-outable via robots.txt). The
| complaint was just a pretext to force Google to pay
| protection money against the spirit of the law, as if
| France is some failed-state thug-government like Libya or
| something.
| rognjen wrote:
| Lobbying power. Similar to how the cinemas prevented any film
| that doesn't debut in a specific number of cinemas for a
| specific exclusive period from being included in festivals and
| being eligible for rewards.
| [deleted]
| trident5000 wrote:
| You make under the table deals with the politicians in power to
| promote them as a candidate and oppose their opposition in
| exchange for legislation like this.
| Hamuko wrote:
| News sites are so special that Google has a separate and
| distinct section for them: Google News.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| That just means they form a coherent vertical, as do retail
| sites (Google shopping), brick-and-mortar
| stores/venues/restaurants (Google maps), flights (Google
| flights), hotels (Google hotels), etc. You're really
| straining the definition of the word "special". It's
| especially inapplicable to the parent comment's referenced
| claim, that they're special enough that Google needs to be
| legally forced into an unwilling transaction with them.
| vladojsem wrote:
| i think there was similar case with google abusing the
| dominance with its shopping comparison service. they got fined
| in 2017 by eu commission1
|
| [1] https://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1784_en.htm
| seertaak wrote:
| What makes them special is that, ostensibly, their role is at
| least in part to hold power to account. So it's important that
| news sites are financially independent. If not, they're in
| effect beholden to other actors, whether in government or the
| private sector.
|
| Or to put it differently, we need more WSJ and NYT, less
| Breitbart and Buzzfeed.
| dehrmann wrote:
| People disagree. They want entertaining news for free.
| manicdee wrote:
| That is how you get Breitbart and Infowars becoming the
| main source of "information" for many people.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| >their role is at least in part to hold power to account
|
| And they suck horribly at doing that. All most news sites
| ever do is constantly pander to uber-elite "woke" moral
| sensibilities and pearl-clutching. That's why people don't
| view them as important and don't want to pay for them.
| qwertycrackers wrote:
| If this is the argument being advanced, then the legislation
| is equivalent to passing a special tax on Google to pay for
| this "vital public service" (not debating the validity of
| this perspective). Why should Google and only Google pay this
| tax? If newspapers are so important, pay them right out of
| the public treasury.
| tomklein wrote:
| It's a win-win already. Google is listing those sites giving them
| the opportunity to be seen by lots of people and news sites sell
| subscriptions or put ads on their sites to make money. I don't
| really get why Google should pay news sites for promoting them
| and helping them make money. Personally, I always clicked to read
| more if I wanted to know more about a certain topic.
| creata wrote:
| Yep. It feels like the news corporations are just being greedy,
| but I'd like to see their side of the case.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Entitlement and very rich well connected owners
| the_other wrote:
| Google and Facebook have been eating such a large proportion
| of the ad cake for years; of course news want a larger slice!
| Whether it's "fair" by the rules of capitalism that they get
| it is up to capitalism to decide, but it's _definitely_ fair
| that they stake a claim.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Ah the the massive advertising cash cow supported by
| journalists paid poverty wages.
|
| Before craigslist and property listing companies like right
| move, local newspapers had 30-40% margins
|
| (source a senior press officer I worked on a project with)
| m12k wrote:
| I think the problem is that politicians know they should be
| regulating big tech, but doing so is hard. And then along
| comes a lobbyist from the news media with some draft
| legislation that's pretty easy to understand and pass. It
| doesn't actually solve any real problem, but it's
| _something_, and it allows them to be seen fighting against
| the bad guys that they're supposed to be fighting. Even
| though it means passing bad legislation
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| 'News corporation' have been rendered pennyless since the
| decline of print, people dont want to pay for digital news.
| This has led to a global decline of standard sin journalism,
| they can't afford to send investigative journalists around
| the world, news stories are poorly researched and written.
|
| As a society we are paying a heavy price for this stupidity
| vkou wrote:
| My understanding is that news corporations have been
| rendered penniless by Craigslist eating their rather
| lucrative classifieds business.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Both are true.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Given that news organizations have been demolished over the
| last decade (in part due to a collapse of ad revenue), how
| much do you think it is reasonable for news organizations to
| charge for their content? If Google shouldn't be paying to
| take the content and redistribute it, who should?
|
| Personally I think there should be state funding for unbiased
| news so that neither the reader nor Google need to pay
| directly, but that's not where we are right now, all the
| important journalism is published by for-profit websites and
| it's behind paywalls. Given that, I don't think it should be
| surprising if a news site sees Google harvesting paragraphs
| from their articles and embedding them into results and goes
| 'hey, who said you could do that without paying for it?'
|
| Google Search infoboxes for a person or place or other topic
| typically are crammed full of information that Googlebot
| pulled from various parts of the internet. It's really useful
| to have that info! But if the websites that the info was
| sourced from rely on ad revenue, well, Google's spider didn't
| click on any ads.
|
| I don't think Google paying news sites for the privilege of
| indexing them is going to fix the revenue model for online
| news, but I also don't believe that the value of those news
| snippets is zero. As the article notes, their attempted
| solution was to switch to Headlines Only (which is what I get
| in the US right now), but the court objected since that was
| an obvious attempt to avoid paying by shipping an inferior
| product.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Their side of the case is that they want money and they have
| the power to get it by influencing politicians and the
| public.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > "Google is listing those sites giving them the opportunity to
| be seen by lots of people [..]"
|
| Ah, yes. Just like when we don't want to pay people for their
| work. "But it will give you visibility and attract customers
| (for your free content anyway)".
| Retric wrote:
| It's a little different if the agreement is visibility _and
| advertising revenue_ or your selling subscriptions.
|
| If news websites where unhappy about the deal they are free
| to use robots.txt and search engines will ignore them. So,
| clearly they receive some benefit and are simply arguing they
| should receive more.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The problem is that the advertising revenue is also
| controlled by Google. Google plays both sides of the ad
| auction market while also controlling site visibility in
| the first place.
|
| In short, Google decides how many people sees your site and
| how much Google pays for those views. News sites have no
| power to negotiate without government intervention.
| Retric wrote:
| There are alternatives to Google for advertising revenue.
|
| No intermediary needed, newspapers used sell advertising
| directly.
| 8note wrote:
| They sure like buying up all the competition though.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| And thus we arrive at the underlying problem. How about
| we address the root instead of the symptoms?
| asar wrote:
| I'd argue that headlines and images are worth a lot, especially
| coming from actual journalist and photographers (not niche seo
| news sites). It is almost considered normal for companies
| scrape the web and combine different sources into personalized
| feeds for their own user bas, as Google does. But it's not
| normal, you could probably say it's stealing.
| qsort wrote:
| It's definitely normal, and massively hypocritical on the
| news sites' part. If they didn't want their content to be
| indexed by search results, they could ask Google to remove
| it, but obviously they want to have their cake and eat it
| too.
|
| This is just "Europe trying to somehow regulate big tech
| chapter #N-plus-one", and while I do actually sympathize with
| the broader goal, _news companies of all people_ complaining
| about Google don 't deserve any compassion whatsoever.
| brmgb wrote:
| > If they didn't want their content to be indexed by search
| results, they could ask Google to remove it
|
| No, they can't. The first answer to the Google issue from
| the French press was sensible. Individualy they know their
| content is worth money but individualy they are weak so
| they try to form a syndicate to negociate with Google in a
| pay-or-nothing position. But Google argued the French
| equivalent of fair use allowed them to scrap titles for
| free.
|
| The French competition regulator had to intervene to force
| Google to go negociate. You can't negociate in good faith
| with a monopoly like Google. As the USA has apparently
| decided it won't apply its antitrust law in order to
| protect the international competitiveness of its abusive
| companies, obviously Europe will have to rein them in.
| jariel wrote:
| The problem here is that Google is a monopoly.
|
| It's like if there were a single supermarket chain and they
| refused to carry a product. Oh well. Customers don't really
| like it, but in the grand scheme the supermarket doesn't
| care.
|
| There are also real issues about value creation and value
| capture in economies. Some places are good at one and not
| the other.
|
| Google depends on 'the content of the world' being given to
| them for free, they'd be nothing without it, by being a
| 'single point of access' it gives them a lot of power.
|
| So free market arguments apply, but it's still more
| complicated.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| www.bing.com/news
| pb7 wrote:
| Monopoly doesn't mean "company I don't like". There is
| absolutely nothing stopping you from searching for news
| on another search engine. Even more importantly, there is
| even less stopping you from going directly to your
| favorite news site.
| jariel wrote:
| Neither of your examples illustrate the nature of
| monopoly, even by technical definition.
|
| There are basically _zero_ markets in which there is one
| completely dominant player due to the nature of 'product
| quality' alone, there are always external factors or even
| natural artifacts of the system that facilitate a
| dominant player.
|
| For the same reason that YC companies don't go ahead and
| just compete with airliner manufacturers such as Boeing
| whereupon the only competition is derived from massive,
| state-backed players - it is not possible to complete
| with Google today.
|
| The barriers to entry towards building a great search
| engine are likely more insurmountable than even those for
| airline carriers, the notion that some entity with the
| 'right stuff' could go ahead and do it is laughable at
| face value.
|
| Compounded with the fact that Google has entrenched and
| most likely anti-competitive distribution to market via
| Android, Chrome - the argument becomes moot.
|
| So first, we need to separate Android, Chrome and Google
| at very least, and then ensure that access to browsing
| technologies is on a truly level playing field. That
| would be a good start.
|
| At this point, frankly, many other browser technologies -
| even those materially inferior would start to come to the
| fore - which is probably illustrative of where the 'true
| power' of Google comes from, i.e. more from distribution
| dominance than from actual search tech.
|
| While we are at it we can legislate grounds for app
| competition, platform openness, personal data ownership
| and the rules concerning the objective self-regulation of
| social media companies.
|
| At the same time, we shouldn't leave the 'sleeping giant'
| MS Windows distribution monopoly out of our sights
| either.
|
| Google has been a barrier to progress for almost a decade
| now, they are just another Oracle but with pink and green
| hair.
| pb7 wrote:
| You can find the exact same stuff on Bing, DuckDuckGo,
| Yandex, Ecosia, Searx, Startpage, Baidu, and many other
| smaller players. Best player != only player. You, as a
| user, shouldn't care whatsoever about the market share of
| your search engine when it returns all the same things.
| Have you seen any of the DuckDuckGo threads on HN? People
| are quite happy with the results they're getting. Google
| being popular doesn't stop a competitor from serving the
| exact same results.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > If they didn't want their content to be indexed by search
| results, they could ask Google to remove it,
|
| You're describing a classic prisoner's dilemma.
|
| That is, it's in the interest of the news industry as a
| whole to not list their content for free, but if individual
| news companies do that, they will lose out relative to the
| alternative, so every individual news company is trapped in
| a situation they don't prefer.
|
| Google set this prisoner's dilemma to their advantage,
| using their position as a monopoly power to create it. It's
| reasonable, then, for the EU and the news industry to seek
| to remove Google's monopoly advantages.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You 're describing a classic prisoner's dilemma._
|
| And, at the root of it, is ad-based business model.
| That's one of the many reasons I believe ad-subsidizing
| should be made illegal: it's anticompetitive and
| antisocial, in that the moment you start doing it,
| competitors need to follow suit, and you destroy the
| possibility of competing using honest, ethically above-
| board business models.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > That is, it's in the interest of the news industry as a
| whole to not list their content for free, but if
| individual news companies do that, they will lose out
| relative to the alternative, so every individual news
| company is trapped in a situation they don't prefer.
|
| No it isn't, because what they do has very little to do
| with what anybody else does.
|
| If your options are get listed for free or don't get
| listed at all, you have the incentive to be listed
| because the traffic makes you more money than not. This
| is true regardless of what anybody else does. Meanwhile
| anybody choosing to be listed doesn't hurt the people
| choosing not to be -- it hurts the other people who are,
| by providing more news sources in the Google search
| results and diluting their traffic.
|
| What you're really saying is that if the largest news
| corporations form a de facto cartel through the use of
| the legislature to prevent Google from freely linking to
| everyone, they can monopolize the industry by disabling a
| discovery mechanism for independent news competitors.
| Aerroon wrote:
| What would happen for users if every news site decided to
| stop being indexed by Google? I think very little.
|
| In some cases we'd probably even benefit, because the
| news sites will stop being ranked higher than the primary
| sources themselves. Quite often when I Google the release
| of a new product or some new government policy the
| highest ranked results are all news articles. They bury
| the actual press release that the government or company
| themselves posted.
| qsort wrote:
| No, this is not the prisoner's dilemma, because the
| parties can communicate and are not bound to the original
| decision. What you're suggesting is that the news
| companies form a cartel.
|
| > It's reasonable, then, for the EU and the news industry
| to seek to remove Google's monopoly advantages.
|
| Yes, it is. But this legislation does _nothing_ to
| attempt to break Google 's monopoly, while at the same
| time granting very weird and very specific privileges to
| the very rich, very well-connected, very corrupt news
| company owners.
|
| Google is absolutely a monopoly and is absolutely abusing
| that position. We should stop the monopoly situation, not
| introduce very weird stuff that _just so happens_ to
| favor people with no reasonable claims whatsoever except
| "I'm friends with the regulator".
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > ...granting very weird and very specific privileges to
| the very rich, very well-connected, very corrupt...
|
| I agree - and this solution has been agreed by Google
| because it suits their interests. They now get to collude
| with other powerful actors without having to worry about
| the less powerful (and have set this as an available
| precedent across the EU).
|
| I would find it more satisfying if Australia called
| Google's bluff and told them where to go.
| majewsky wrote:
| > No, this is not the prisoner's dilemma, because the
| parties can communicate and are not bound to the original
| decision. What you're suggesting is that the news
| companies form a cartel.
|
| The second sentence disproves the first. It's
| _effectively_ a prisoner 's dilemma because communication
| between the players is _effectively_ infeasible through
| illegality.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| If you can't innovate it's time to regulate!
| anon98356 wrote:
| Why not? Google set itself up effectively as a gatekeeper
| to their content (whether by design or not that is the
| current situation) then completely gutted their primary
| revenue stream.
|
| Also, the major driver of this news is Google's attempts to
| get Australia to drop legislation. Australia is about as
| far away from Europe as you can get
| qsort wrote:
| > Google set itself up effectively as a gatekeeper to
| their content
|
| This isn't a fair characterization. They _want_ their
| content to be indexed by Google, and furthermore most of
| those entities have separate distribution channels
| (television networks, print newspapers, etc.) that Google
| can 't touch. Most people don't want to buy newspapers or
| watch news channels, but frankly they are _absolutely
| correct_ , because 99% of that is freaking garbage no
| better than your average Facebook group.
|
| > Australia
|
| s/Europe/politicians-worldwide/g
|
| My point wasn't about Europe in particular (just
| observing that this kind of move, for better or for
| worse, is more popular in the EU). Again, I do agree that
| we should do something about Google & friends, but this
| piece of legislation is the classical politician's
| fallacy: we should do something, this is something, hence
| this is good.
| anon98356 wrote:
| I think it is a fair characterisation. They want their
| content on Google because if they don't then it won't be
| seen. I'm not saying this was a deliberate strategy by
| Google but it is the reality.
|
| I would argue most people don't want to buy newspapers
| because we have created an expectation that content
| should be free.
|
| As to the quality of the content, a) that's subjective
| and b) it can be seen as natural evolution of an industry
| whose income source has been decimated by
| Google/Facebook. It's a lot cheaper to produce what you
| (and I do as well, to be fair) consider garbage than to
| produce the quality content we would like to see coming
| from newspapers.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Are you saying that if Google doesn't have News (like in
| Spain), that people will just stop reading the news at
| all? If so, news obviously is t very important, since
| there are many ways to find news, including searching for
| "news site" on Google!
| User23 wrote:
| Because it's the law is why. It is interesting though how
| completely unwilling the US government is to rein in big tech.
| The Europeans have no such reluctance and are well within their
| rights.
| new_here wrote:
| Exactly, with the current system Google is incentivised to
| prioritise the best content for users. If they now negotiate
| individual licensing agreements with each publisher this adds
| another factor (cost) to the ranking incentive.
|
| Also, where do you draw the line on what content Google should
| have to pay to index? What about independent bloggers for
| example? This policy could potentially open a whole new can of
| worms.
| mrtksn wrote:
| How Google is incentivised to prioritise the best content for
| users? Google doesn't make anything if you quickly find what
| you are making for and consume it.
|
| Google's optimal position would be if you keep searching for
| the stuff you are looking for and get distracted by ads and
| buy something in the process.
|
| The second best thing would be if you find the stuff you are
| looking for directly on Google(Google no longer shows only
| search results but the content of the results as if it comes
| from them) and then you proceed to buy something through an
| ad click.
|
| For example, Google wins if you search for "When did Trump
| leave the White House" and you see a snipped containing
| "Trump left the WH in the early morning of January 20, 2021
| using a helicopter". Now that you have your answer through
| the content that Google mined for free, they can monetize you
| but what about the people who put together that information?
| Why they would be left out of your business? What's fair
| about that?
|
| There was a recent HN discussion about Google mining the
| database of a small business that specialises on compiling
| information on the wealth of celebrities. They lost most of
| their traffic when Google began showing the answer from their
| database directly instead of showing the link that contains
| this information. Here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24105465
| new_here wrote:
| If users feel they get the best results from Google then
| they continue to use Google which drives search and ad
| impressions. Ads are also clearly labelled so users can
| decide if they want to ignore sponsored results. I
| typically click the first result below ads or use an
| adblocker but that's just me. So this seems like a clear
| distinction between paid and organic results.
|
| I completely agree on the second point. Google's 'Featured
| Snippets' are a clear overreach where Google uses people's
| content at no cost and gives nothing in return. This needs
| to be regulated because nobody is going to opt-out. For
| example, I've had some featured snippets and they bring a
| lot of traffic. Much less than a normal first place listing
| but more than a second place listing. If I opt-out of
| Featured Snippets in protest then someone else will just
| happily take that spot.
|
| Perhaps the balance lies in just indexing headlines of
| sites. Then publishers could decide if they want to give up
| that information in their headlines. It's a tough to know
| where to draw the line but that seems like it's been the
| fairest balance so far.
| academia_hack wrote:
| The alternative to search snippets is a world where I have
| to be bombarded with cookie consent popups and
| advertisement and then scroll through paragraphs of
| nonsense to get the two word answer to a trivial question.
| Google adds enormous value in synthesizing this information
| and presenting it only when it is relevant. I don't know
| why people think they have an inmate right to make profits
| off of basic facts and trivial public data.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _Also, where do you draw the line on what content Google
| should have to pay to index? What about independent bloggers
| for example? This policy could potentially open a whole new
| can of worms._
|
| I'm actually curious now about the principle here. Can the
| same idea be applied to the news websites themselves? If a
| news organization links to a Twitter thread then can Twitter
| or the users of Twitter demand payment from the news
| organization? If not, why not? What if it's a blog instead?
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| A time of news articles these days is just filler around
| some tweets. Damn, your comment is a good take, and Twitter
| should do exactly this
| 8note wrote:
| For twitter, you've given twitter a free license to reshare
| your content.
|
| If it's a blog on a site you control, you can control that
| license
| piokoch wrote:
| And you nailed it perfectly "Personally, I always clicked to
| read more if I wanted to know more about a certain topic."
|
| The crux is that all those "information" sites want you to
| click even if you are totally not interested with the story.
|
| That's why you get all those titles like "prime minister was
| running around naked", so you think "what the heck is going on
| with our PM", and then it turns out it was prime minister of
| some obscure country and it happened 30 years ago.
|
| Today clicks matter, page overlay adds matter, subscription
| invitations matter, and so on. Google cuts significant number
| of those if you can see a snippet of the article and it is
| clear that there comes some cheap click-bait.
| lhorie wrote:
| Doesn't it go both ways though? If there's a financial cost
| for Google to show links to articles, wouldn't it then be in
| Google's best interest to decrease the quantity of shallow
| articles that all more or less say the same thing with ever
| clickbaitier titles, in favor of showing fewer
| authoritative/comprehensive sources?
| jkinudsjknds wrote:
| Fewer articles shown is probably correct. But more
| clickbaity sounds more likely to me.
| pb7 wrote:
| In before Google gets accused of manipulating search
| results to favor certain flavors of news publications over
| others.
| lhorie wrote:
| They already do that, though?
| pb7 wrote:
| Do they? Care to share any kind of evidence?
| lhorie wrote:
| For example, google something like "Trump" in the US vs
| Canada and you'll get different news outlets (e.g. wapo
| vs ctv).
|
| Or watch right wing videos in youtube in incognito mode
| and compare home page recommendations with the ones in
| your regular account.
|
| Historically, they've also changed their search
| algorithms to prioritize certain types of web properties
| over others (for example the Google Panda update). Etc.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I guess I'm not terribly disappointed that Google may
| depriving them of that kind of revenue stream.
| v4dok wrote:
| News made their money through ads. Now no one buys ad real estate
| on newspapers so they have to serve google adds on their websites
| which is a fraction of the income they would get.
|
| Google is eating up the lunch of news, so news have to find
| another way to monetize. Of course, we come slowly but surely to
| the understanding that News are essential to the society even
| without generating profit. But who pays the bills??
|
| Government cant without making them depended on them and hence
| biasing the news. People are not seeing the immediate value since
| they are spoon fed this clickbait, bigot garbage and they think
| they are "up to date. Forcing the ads behemoths to share the pie
| seems like a logical step, although, its ill-executed and ofc the
| incentive for Google would be to minimize that cost.
|
| This game is now getting started.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| But this is the government paying, just with Google serving as
| the middle man. There's no actual economic linkage here, which
| means that Google's payments to the news organizations are
| actually a tax that skips the public coffers and goes straight
| to the news owners. But it's no different than if the
| government levied a tax specifically on Google and paid the
| whole of that tax to the news orgs. Both approaches make an
| equal amount of economic sense.
|
| Personally I think it would make much more sense to raise a
| general corporate profit tax, and use the proceeds of that tax
| to pay the news. But there's a convenient devil to extract
| money from, so there it is.
| mrtksn wrote:
| In some countries the government pays the bills in exchange of
| favourable coverage. How do they pay? The owner gets government
| contracts in other industries or the government buys ads or
| issues as public service.
|
| In lest corrupt countries but still with corrupt journalistic
| ethics the news becomes the ads.
|
| The entire tech journalism business revolve around this. Give
| me good reviews and I will send you demo units, I will take you
| to a camp and will give you real good accommodation and slap a
| paid promotion video order as an extra.
|
| extra governmental political journalism is also not any better.
| You become a mouthpiece for a political group and the funnel
| money to sustain your publication.
|
| You can tap ads business for the stuff that is not allowed to
| be openly advertised. For example, in some places where doctors
| are not allowed to advertise the news channels will offer an
| interview about certain illness in exchange of payment from the
| interviewer. The news sites get their content and get paid for
| it, the doctors get their name on news articles that looks
| legit journalistic work.
|
| It's really unfortunate.
| phillipseamore wrote:
| I wonder if Google is running a large scale A/B experiment.
|
| Agree to pay in France while testing removal of news results in
| Australia.
| sheepdestroyer wrote:
| Only two test cases, Isn't it the smallest scale possible?
| severine wrote:
| Google News hasn't worked in Spain for years:
| https://support.google.com/news/publisher-
| center/answer/9609...
|
| So at least three test cases, and I guess there are more.
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| I honestly don't think News is worth the business headache of
| this. I suspect Google makes most of its ad revenue from brand
| keywords (the first result for "nike" being an ad for nike.com)
| and e-commerce keywords. News is a nice-to-have for users, but
| if they left it to a third party, it wouldn't drive away users
| or much revenue.
| simonh wrote:
| My guess is News Showcase, the new service Google has created for
| this paid linked news, will become a little used search backwater
| the French mainstream News services go to die. Not hosting them
| in News itself is as close as Google can get to not hosting them
| at all. Meanwhile the small independent French news publishers on
| Google News should get a nice boost without Old News to compete
| with.
|
| How the French News groups don't see this is beyond me, but there
| seems no limit to the level of stupid coming from European
| publishers. They probably even think they've finally won, and
| that News Showcase is a brilliant way to segment their premium
| content. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out,
| but my bet is Google just completely blindsided them - pass the
| popcorn.
| csomar wrote:
| Anyone did (or willing to do) research on how to become eligible
| for Google cash? I think you can't put particular names in
| legislation (ie: Pay xx euros for xx clicks for Le Figaro); and I
| also don't think Google is going to pay up any site who shows up
| on his News result.
|
| So how is the eligibility being determined and what is the
| process to get the money?
| fakedang wrote:
| There is a process for newsrooms to get into Google News, so I
| assume they'll use that vetting to determine if a site should
| be paid or not. Which means that for news that Google links to
| that does not come from News, but from Search, they will likely
| not pay for it.
| rognjen wrote:
| I think that this is a (smart) move to show Australia what
| they're willing to do and what they're not.
|
| I haven't yet formulated a complete opinion on this whole
| situation though. On the one hand the issue of Google showing
| better and better results based on someone else's content is
| clever and good for their users while on the other it is to the
| detriment of the creator of that content.
| comboy wrote:
| Somebody will make the next version of GPT read the all existing
| published law and it will be a clusterfuck. Tons of
| contradictions, everybody is guilty of something, nobody except
| computer program can hold it in their memory to know when and
| what should apply. It's madness.
|
| Yes I know it's only tangentially related, but I believe most
| regulations against big tech only establish their domination.
| These companies can likely invest more resources in legal
| analysis than the goverment, so they will use most of it to their
| advantage.
|
| Laws should be as general as possible. We have robots.txt, you
| can even add some new marker, if some news site doesn't want to
| have it content fetched in an automated way, let it have that but
| it's already a slippery slope because why should a human be able
| to read it and write an article citing source if a program cannot
| do that.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| I kinda want to help make this a reality..
|
| Even though I believe that a solely
| "mechanical"/"logical"interpretation of laws, misses the point
| in some really important ways.
|
| Approaching law/justice systems as a computer system to be
| manipulated, usually results in the judge seeing through the
| manipulation and cracking down on it, while still enforcing the
| spirit of the law rather than adhering to mechanical minutiae..
|
| (Modulus the differences between common law and civil law
| jurisdictions, which probably colours my view)
| kazen44 wrote:
| contradictions also exist in civil law systems (ofcourse).
| But seem to be far less... cloudy then common law systems.
|
| Most contradictions in civil law seem to either be from
| really old law (think, pre french revolution/napoleonic
| period) or from weird edge cases which get covered by two
| laws which contradict themselves.
|
| The first one is usually not resolved because it is just
| straight up ignored. There was a famous example of this a
| couple of years ago about a law which prohibited people from
| carrying swords/knives inside city walls.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| While I generally agree with you (look how VATMOSS, that was
| supposed to be a way to force Amazon to pay vat taxes, forced
| all the small sellers - without money to spend on
| implementation - on Amazon), I don't see an upside for Google.
|
| This is likely just change for Google though. They probably
| consider the value of showing French newspaper content to be
| higher than whatever the price has been set.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > ...but I believe most regulations against big tech only
| establish their domination. These companies can likely invest
| more resources in legal analysis than the goverment, so they
| will use most of it to their advantage.
|
| If that were true, or true to the degree suggested here, I
| don't think these companies would fight regulation as hard as
| they do. Rather, they'd embrace them and encourage more.
|
| IMHO, this kind of thinking is an interesting bit of free
| market propaganda, to the effect of convincing people that
| they're helpless in the face of domination by some corporation
| or other, and their only option is to wait patiently for some
| market-driven "creative destruction" to occur in the (perhaps
| far) future.
| comboy wrote:
| Let me elaborate. Even ignoring potential loopholes and just
| creating new dynamics - they don't want it, the cost is high
| to adjust to that regulation. Creating some tools may be
| necessary, just getting familiar with it and creating a plan
| to follow it is a cost.
|
| Now this cost is additional entry cost for new companies,
| unless the law is passed specifically with the original
| company name with it, which I think should never be the case
| because law should apply equally to everybody.
|
| High entry cost is exactly how monopolies are created.
|
| Creating a youtube clone is much simpler than creating a
| youtube clone that doesn't brake any existing laws and
| regulations. Every additional regulation is making it harder.
|
| Case in point, I've run a forum for coders for 15 years with
| thousands of users. When the GDPR came out, I did not have
| time to make sure I follow it, the cost was too high, I shut
| it down. And of course the law was to protect users privacy
| from big evil companies. Guess who had money and resources to
| make sure they follow it.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Creating a youtube clone is much simpler than creating a
| youtube clone that doesn't brake any existing laws and
| regulations. Every additional regulation is making it
| harder.
|
| Though, that's an exceedingly narrow perspective, judging
| things exclusively on the effect on startup costs and
| ignoring everything else. An increase in startup costs
| often is an acceptable price to pay in order to achieve
| other goals. For instance, environmental regulations
| definitely make it more expensive and difficult to spin up
| many kinds of industrial plants (e.g. plant builders need
| to buy pollution control equipment and use more expensive
| processes that create less pollution), but it means less
| unhealthy air and rivers that can support life and don't
| catch on fire [1]. All the competition in the world won't
| achieve that.
|
| I think it's pretty useless to talk about "regulations"
| generically. It's really only helpful to talk about the
| costs and benefits of particular regulations, since that's
| the only context where you can figure out if the regulation
| is a net good or not.
|
| [1] https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Cuyahoga_River_Fire
|
| > Case in point, I've run a forum for coders for 15 years
| with thousand of users. When the GDPR came out, I did not
| have time to make sure I follow it, the cost was too high,
| I shut it down. And of course the law was to protect users
| privacy from big evil companies. Guess who had money and
| resources to make sure they follow it.
|
| While that may have been a negative to you personally, the
| alternative is to allow those big companies to violate
| users' privacy in ways the law forbids, which is worse.
| Also, I'm a little skeptical that the GDPR would actually
| placed much if any burden on site such as yours.
| comboy wrote:
| Environmental regulations are a good counterpoint and
| analogy. That shifts my perspective a bit, thanks. I
| admit food/safety/env regulations occupied a different
| pocket in my head and maybe it's less far away from this
| topic that I considered it to be.
|
| I mention regulations in general and not particular one,
| because the context that you are talking about is placed
| within bigger context of everything around changing. And
| once law is put in place is almost never removed.
|
| Re forum, collecting emails seem to count as personal
| data, maybe the amount of work wouldn't be high, but
| researching what do I really need to do, how to register
| personal data database etc. was high, there were not much
| info available at the time. AFAIR changes were pretty
| brutal to me since I was miraculously running on some
| very deprecated phpBB with a few manual patches which
| kept bots away.
|
| And wow, I think what we currently consider to be a
| polluted river is pretty clean in historical context.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Good for you French newspapers.
|
| Enjoy the free money.
|
| This is exactly why the next Google won't be a French company.
| d0100 wrote:
| Couldn't Google just GPT3 the titles and not have to pay?
| dannyw wrote:
| Google should just remove all news sites from their search
| results completely.
| ketzu wrote:
| I can understand if people hold the opinion google shouldn't
| have to pay for that and that market preasure for news
| organizations is the organizations problem and not that of
| google.
|
| I have a hard time following the idea that google should use
| its dominant market position to force others into submission.
| This sounds distinctively worse than convincing a
| democratically elected government that you need protection
| (e.g., because the market is failing to some degree and your
| industry is important for the country in some form). This
| wouldn't be a good result for consumers either.
|
| Google is not an underdog screwed by some corrupt government
| and is just too honest and noble to bribe the law away or
| invest in any form of lobbying.
| bluecalm wrote:
| The problem with convincing a democratically elected
| government is that existing players can use their power
| (think of the jobs!) to rescue their bad business and thus
| preventing better alternatives from coming up.
|
| I for one think news industry is worse than worthless. No
| news would be better than current news. I think there is a
| need for information but news is selectively picked
| information turned into entertainment. I don't think we are
| better informed nor in any other way better off because of
| this junk. Let it fail and see what comes up next.
| sidibe wrote:
| > I have a hard time following the idea that google should
| use its dominant market position to force others into
| submission
|
| If it's just a case of legally avoiding the new law, it's not
| a case of using "its dominant position to force others into
| submission." If they remove the smallest level of what makes
| them noncompliant, which in this case might be removing
| search outright (because otherwise they are supposed to link
| to and pay the news sites), to me that's fair game and not
| monopolistic. If they threaten to do something to unrelated
| things like Gmail or GCP, that's not OK.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| "The French Competition Authority held that the deal Google
| offered to news sites--let us index your site for free or we
| won't index it at all--was an abuse of that market power and
| contrary to the spirit of the new French law."
|
| This is why this law is so terrible. If the government wants news
| media to keep its role in society, it should not force a private
| entity to pay a "failed to monetize the web"-tax.
|
| News companies cannot demand payment while they demand that
| Google indexes their pages for them. The lobbying of the news
| industry it truly terrible and has made me question if I want to
| pay for any news media when the national news service is
| perfectly fine and accessible for free. I want to support
| independent journalism, but I don't want to sponsor the
| moneymaking schemes they're inserting into the law.
| Phlogistique wrote:
| > News companies cannot demand payment while they demand that
| Google indexes their pages for them
|
| You have got it wrong.
|
| Nobody asks of Google that they pay for indexing news sites in
| Google Search. And no news company wants to force Google to
| include their content in Google News.
|
| The thing is there are two different services, Google News and
| Google Search. The news companies have a beef with Google News.
| Google has been saying: if you do not accept us using your
| content in Google News, we will remove you from Google Search.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Unsurprising. Old economies have old power structures. They
| suppress disruptors as much as possible. This is why Europe - a
| continent generally as large and educated as America - has such
| few startups.
|
| Most startups have been great for the world. Google, Facebook,
| Amazon, Netflix, Apple. They've made our world so much better.
|
| But old power structures are all about the status quo.
|
| Strictly, _this particular thing_ isn 't why the next such useful
| startup won't be from France. It just showcases the way that
| country's power structures operate. They're heavily status quo
| oriented. It's always about "how do we pay the current church its
| tithe".
| danbolt wrote:
| I mean, like, Facebook was fun back when bringing a digital
| camera to high school made you a big deal online in 2007. Today
| though, Zuck has access to an archive of me with the worst
| haircuts I'll ever have had in my life.
| lapinot wrote:
| Right. Disgusting to see these states crushing random corps
| that try keeping afloat.. oh, or did i mean to say these corps
| crushing random states that try keeping afloat?
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's neither disgusting nor gusting. It's just that when you
| do this you also get that. If you want neither, that's fine,
| but clearly France is trying to also get some startups, but
| it's not going to work. Because France will eat you if you
| get big and the risk is too high to be worth it if you only
| get moderate.
| weregiraffe wrote:
| >Most startups have been great for the world. Google, Facebook,
| Amazon, Netflix, Apple. They've made our world so much better.
|
| This claim about massive corporations making the world better
| is disputed.
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| If I started a small news aggregator app, would I also have to
| pay these sites or is it only for large companies.
| benlivengood wrote:
| The problem is that news media run terrible ads that don't make
| them money and the paradox of choice makes subscribing to
| individual news organizations a losing proposition for just about
| everyone.
|
| Music and video producers make money because they license their
| content for streaming and online purchases. I'm at a loss for why
| the news media hasn't figured out how to do this yet. My fear is
| that ultimately the market values news too little.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| >My fear is that ultimately the market values news too little.
|
| This is a fate that could befall music/movies as well. News
| media is too "woke" for its own good (for lack of a more
| accurate, more complex, longer explanation), and people are
| abandoning it in droves.
|
| The type of media that will survive is the kind you see in
| India that's overly nationalistic. It's upsetting, but that's
| clearly what the market wants and will pay for.
| [deleted]
| njarboe wrote:
| "News" has little value and that's fine. It is "new" things and
| in this internet world it is fleeting, click-bait articles
| purely read for entertainment. Main stream research journalism
| is what I fear the market does not value. The best researchers
| now have private highly paid news letters.
| cheriot wrote:
| They use to do that. The problem is that it makes less sense in
| a digital world because you want a single URI to consolidate
| shares and SEO.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_syndication
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