[HN Gopher] Google threatens to cut off news after California pr...
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Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying
media outlets
Author : rntn
Score : 174 points
Date : 2024-04-12 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| ratsmack wrote:
| There is no love lost between me and Google, but then I have zero
| regard for "news" organizations that are attempting to strong-arm
| funds from Google for their failing business model.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 100%. I can't think of a less empathetic beneficiary of this
| bill than Chatham Asset Management and the other vulture firms
| that are overseeing the destruction of the news business.
| mc32 wrote:
| I agree with this sentiment 100%. They've (diff news orgs and
| gov'ts) tried this tactic elsewhere and they have failed, but
| there still are folks who think if they try again, this time
| they will be lucky or they can find a sympathetic ear in the
| gov't to do the dirty work for them.
| LegitShady wrote:
| is it news orgs or governments? News orgs can't enact taxes
| without co-opting governments to pass laws.
|
| But I agree these link taxes are a fundamentally broken concept
| where legacy media looks to strongarm funds out of others for
| sharing their publicly shared news.
| maronato wrote:
| It's news orgs through lobbying
| baggy_trough wrote:
| A tax on linking is absurd and would be deeply harmful.
| umvi wrote:
| Tax on linking = less linking.
|
| The whole thing smells like wealth distribution ("hmm, the
| journalism industry is struggling, but the tech industry is
| booming. The tech industry interacts with the journalism
| industry, maybe we can help the journalism industry by
| mandating a new wealth gradient flowing from one to support the
| other?")
| paxys wrote:
| Laws like these help the top media conglomerates (who are the
| ones lobbying for them), not the journalism industry at
| large.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I'm very pro capitalism but I do think redistribution makes
| sense in the context of giant corporations that are
| effectively immune to competition. Why do you think Google
| and Amazon and others can create entire products that never
| make a profit for years and then unceremoniously shut them
| down or reduce their investments in them? Everyone else has
| to try to survive based on their merits and actually make
| money. Platform owners can be very abusive because those
| dependent on the platform can have no choice and no voice to
| speak up. We see this everywhere - whether it is Amazon's
| abuse of third party sellers or Google's abuse of content
| creators (including news) or Apple's abuse of app developers.
| We don't need to craft a bunch of very targeted laws to reign
| this in - we just need to split them up and tax any company
| with market cap above $500B heavily.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > Why do you think Google and Amazon and others can create
| entire products that never make a profit for years and then
| unceremoniously shut them down or reduce their investments
| in them?
|
| It seems like Google and Amazon shutting down or divesting
| some products would make room for a lot of competitors to
| step in and dominate that space.
| blitzar wrote:
| "We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting
| journalism."
|
| I have long said that google takes the wrong approach to
| supporting lots of things; but the execs just tell me to f'off
| and jump into their pool filled with $100 bills.
| yuliyp wrote:
| I think that comment is just an allusion to their fights with
| Australia and Canada over doing the same thing.
| kemayo wrote:
| I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking
| to something is a bad idea.
|
| It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's
| clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis
| of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News
| (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good
| justification for charging.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea.
|
| If you're profiting from it, it's not a bad idea.
| CalRobert wrote:
| If I run a newsletter that links to interesting properties
| for sale, should I be charged a fee for this?
| timothyduong wrote:
| Maybe if your newsletter gets billions of subscribers and
| you're making stacks from it, according to news outlets,
| yes
| bko wrote:
| Aren't you providing marketing to the newspaper? Isn't that
| what these news agencies pay google billions for? There's a
| whole industry (seo) designed around getting your site
| linked.
|
| This looks like a money grab to me. What am I missing?
| Zak wrote:
| Why? What moral or legal principle entitles someone to
| compensation for linking to their website whether or not
| you're profiting from that?
|
| It's a different question when there's an excerpt or machine-
| generated summary. In that case, copyright applies, and in
| most jurisdictions it may or may not be fair use depending on
| what is copied and how it is presented.
| bloppe wrote:
| It's actually still a bad idea, because nobody will link to
| you
| estebarb wrote:
| In that case Google should pay everyone they link to, not
| just the ones with politician friends that can lobby for
| themselves.
|
| If they don't want a Google to index them they can use
| robots.txt to prevent it.
| jtriangle wrote:
| Exactly. If google showing your site in search results is a
| problem, it's trivial to remove yourself from said search
| results, and to prevent your site from ever being crawled
| in the first place.
|
| What's actually happening here is that news media orgs were
| in a huge bubble because of the advent of the internet, and
| they've failed to monetize effectively. So they're looking
| for a revenue source to shore up their failed model, and
| they know they'd lose revenue if they removed themselves
| from search results.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I think you're ignoring that there is a path to getting
| to users/customers for many types of products like news,
| which are the tightly controlled platforms of giant tech
| companies (Google, Meta, etc), and there isn't viability
| for products like news unless they play ball with these
| big tech companies. It's not that they haven't monetized
| effectively, but rather that there are gatekeepers in the
| way with no real competition, who can steal your margin
| by showing part of your news story. All of this is really
| a classic problem of anti-trust, and what a monopoly is
| today is different from the past but we haven't
| acknowledged this properly in my view.
| freedomben wrote:
| If that's true (and I agree that it is), then charging
| for links is going to make it even worse and effectively
| cement that reality for all time. How is a startup who
| can't afford to pay employees, let alone publishers,
| supposed to come by and provide some alternative?
|
| Possibly perhaps, the big publishers (with deep pockets
| and lobbyists) really like this approach because despite
| entrenching big tech, it erects formidable barriers to
| entry for new upstart competitors to them? Regulatory
| capture is a tried and true tactic for industries that
| reach a certain size.
|
| IMHO society is a lot better off trying to prevent
| summarization efforts (that eliminate the need for the
| user to visit the page) than they are trying to charge
| for links. The latter is something that benefits
| _everyone_ regardless of size. I 'm not necessarily in
| favor of doing that either (would need to think it
| through a lot more, because it would essentially
| legislate a worse user experience, which is not something
| to be done without serious deliberation), but it seems
| like a much more relevant fight to have and one that
| isn't so self-serving.
| kemayo wrote:
| The proposed California law is written so that it
| basically only applies to Google and other social media
| giants. You need to have 50M+ monthly users, or be owned
| by someone with either a market cap of $550B+ or 1B+
| monthly users.
|
| The text: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB886/id/2832517
|
| So, at least in theory, some nimble startup could come in
| and have a lasting advantage against the big existing
| platforms until they got big enough that they could
| handle dealing with the regulations.
|
| I do have mixed feelings about the recent laws written
| like this. It feels like if it's important that we pay
| news publishers, that should apply to everyone.
| stonogo wrote:
| It's trivial to remove yourself from Google search
| results _if you have a Google account_. People who don 't
| want to do business with Google don't regard that as
| trivial, since Google asks for a ton of personal
| information during onboarding.
| kemayo wrote:
| You don't need a Google account. Googlebot respects
| robots.txt, as far as I know.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Well, yeah it is a bad idea. Because if you tax links to your
| content Google will just stop linking to your content. Which
| is exactly what they're poised to do, as per TFA.
| datavirtue wrote:
| If you want less of something, tax it.
| giuseppe_petri wrote:
| Or provide a better alternative. Less stick, more carrot.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| Or is this is all just bargaining and leverage before they
| make a deal, as they have elsewhere in the world
| refulgentis wrote:
| I worked at Google until October 2023, the blog post is in bad
| faith.
|
| This is a good comment that gets at why[1], TL;DR: the hedge
| fund thing is a _complete_ nonsequitur. The programs are the
| equivalent of Google Cloud grants, and Google actively
| disinvested from News[2] just because that was an easy place to
| get your mandated Sundar cuts for Wall Street.
|
| They're not a good steward of anything other than their stock
| price.
|
| I don't like the idea of a link tax but I do know, 100%, that
| blog post is slanted and mealy-mouthed on everything I know
| first-hand about.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015572
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/technology/google-
| layoffs...
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| The link tax is a red herring and a poor understanding on the
| part of legislators. The real issue is pre-adtech publishers
| kept 100% of ad revenue and double click now takes a massive
| cut (which they briefly touch on).
|
| All that cash flowing into MTV is real people's jobs and
| livelihood being drained away - it's also the reason search
| is entering a utility collapse curve since AI can generate
| unlimited click bait.
|
| Double click will end up killing google, it's already too
| late to go back.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Cheers -- I didn't know that. Interesting parallel to the
| 30% app store wars: people can argue till they're blue in
| the face with analogy after analogy, and I can easily talk
| myself into either perspective being obviously correct...
|
| ...at the end of the day, I'd be happy to see a tax pass,
| some mix of what you put excellently as "real people's jobs
| and livelihood being drained away", and I imagine similar
| to you given your MTV reference, experiencing there wasn't
| really anything special going on at BigCo. It's plain old
| economic inefficiency, not poor beleaguered good guy G
| that's always looking out for news and just trying to
| organize the world's information.
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| Yes and GNI was always an attempt by the wolf to curry
| favor with the sheep, they act like it's some sort of
| grant but it's always been about controlling narrative.
|
| Journalists aren't dumb either, talk to anybody who
| directly got one or was involved in the process.
| cherioo wrote:
| Genuine question, why don't publishers stop using
| doubleclick and build their own?
| riku_iki wrote:
| network effect for example: lots of advertisers are
| deeply integrated into google Ads infra.
|
| But there is competition in this space.
| bevekspldnw wrote:
| Google has thoroughly rigged the space, including
| manipulating bid stream data to underpay publishers while
| overcharging the advertiser. It's called Project Bernake
| which is public now. I have it on reliable sources there
| is a lot more beyond that.
|
| The search antitrust suit was garbage, but the coming
| trials in the ad auction suit is going to hurt a lot
| more. They total lost their way, it's actually insane
| when you'll see what theyve been doing.
|
| Google never stopped "innovating", they just shifted
| their innovation to fraud.
|
| https://adtechexplained.com/google-project-bernanke-
| explaine...
| araes wrote:
| Having never read this, current Texas anti-trust lawsuit.
| [1]
|
| Alleges quite a bit, yet the main four in the article
| are.
|
| 1) Google says it runs a Second Price auction, but really
| runs a Third Price auction, ignores the 2nd bid, and
| takes the difference for (shifting purposes). Telling a
| Publisher they made $8, when they would have made $12.80.
|
| 2) Google inflates bids of buyers "to ensure their
| advertisers beat out bids from competing buying
| platforms". Artificially making their platform look
| better economically. Was individual cases, yet now
| alleged to be a global pool of stolen Publisher money.
|
| 3) Gaining access to Publisher's ad-spend behavior with
| Dynamic Allocation, and then using the info to make sure
| rival platforms seemed less competitive by manipulating
| and inflating other bids. Make sure they always seem to
| lose by $0.01 on every bid.
|
| 4) Forcing Publishers to accept Dynamic Allocation by
| punishing them with the maximum allowed revenue drop for
| Bernake (40%) while inflating competitors. Notably
| Machiavellian that there was a known allowed revenue
| drop. "We're bein nice, we'll only cut you 25%"
|
| On a slightly different topic, made me wonder how many
| investment firms artificially lower rates on funds to
| scrape a bit of profit off the top.
|
| [1] https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/
| images/... (note, the child-support location is really
| weird)
| PeterisP wrote:
| All of what you write is in support of the parent post
| suggestion "why don't publishers stop using doubleclick
| and build their own?" - the larger margin Google is
| taking (no matter how) between advertisers and
| publishers, the better deal publishers can offer when
| telling advertisers "come to our platform directly and
| get the same ad placements much cheaper"..
| refulgentis wrote:
| Right. You get it.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Google has thoroughly rigged the space, including
| manipulating bid stream data to underpay publishers while
| overcharging the advertiser
|
| That seems an argument for news publishers rolling their
| own, not against.
|
| What you are allegeding is nasty, but it should also make
| it easier to build a coompeting service not harder.
| swatcoder wrote:
| You know that thing where Google tracks every action you
| take online, and everything you do on your phone, and
| everywhere you go with your phone, and every calendar
| detail you enter, and every contact you keep, and every
| dumb curiosity you think to look up when you're bored or
| wanting?
|
| Advertisers like that.
|
| It's tough to sell them on something else, and
| essentially impossible to replicate as is.
| WalterBright wrote:
| We welcome all links to dlang.org! No fees!
| burnte wrote:
| I actually agree with it too. Google and Facebook aren't the
| reason news outlets have cash problems and a free teat to latch
| on to isn't the answer. News is important, but let's fix the
| problem in a better way.
| adrr wrote:
| What is the problem with news? Why aren't people willing to
| pay for it?
| imzadi wrote:
| I don't think the issue is that people aren't willing to
| pay for it. The problem is, there aren't currently good
| options for paying for it. If I go to a news site and it is
| paywalled, I just leave. I am not going to subscribe to
| every single newspaper. If I could easily pay for today's
| paper (not an individual news story or a full subscription)
| without giving up all my persona info, I would probably buy
| 2 - 3 papers a day from various sources.
| alistairSH wrote:
| $40/year for the WaPo and you can pay with PayPal or
| Apple. You don't give them any more money than any other
| online vendor.
| bawolff wrote:
| That price point seems high.
|
| For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a
| lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.
| ca7 wrote:
| I'm not willing to pay for someone else's slanted takes.
| There are websites that provide that for free (e.g.
| Reddit).
| aetherson wrote:
| Because people don't value it.
|
| I mean, seriously, that's the reason.
|
| Back when newspapers were healthy, basically there was all
| this stuff that was bundled with the actual news that was
| of more immediate utility to people: classifieds, movie
| reviews, comics, coupons. And there was less competition
| for people's leisure time.
|
| News is now in a very competitive leisure time landscape
| and is debundled from stuff that's of high value, and most
| people just don't care that much about news. They'll read
| it when it's around but they won't pay for it. The ones who
| are willing to pay for it mostly just subscribe to the New
| York Times because in a nationalized news environment why
| not go for the biggest producer.
| internetter wrote:
| Completely agree with all this, though _my_ take away is
| that there 's a big vicious cycle of adblockers and
| paywalls where they keep getting worse. I can't afford to
| subscribe to every newspaper I read. All the local (and
| smaller national) papers should unionize and make one
| subscription for something like $20 a month
| adrr wrote:
| Isn't that apple news+?
| whycome wrote:
| The publishers didn't do that and it's Apple-only.
| internetter wrote:
| And you still see ads
| bawolff wrote:
| I think that is a part of it, but its not just that.
|
| News provied two services in the old days: access and
| filtering.
|
| Back in the day you couldn't easily get things straight
| from the horses mouth, now you can just go to their
| website.
|
| If you did have direct access in the old days, it was all
| way too much. There was no way to filter to 10-minutes
| worth of top goings on. Now a days you can just look at
| what is upvoted and stop once you have read enough.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Journalism quality has tanked, and social media acts as
| some degree of (free+fast) competition, furthering the
| death spiral.
| dylan604 wrote:
| To expand, journalists used to actually investigate which
| took time which means it took money so that the story
| released had lots of corroborating sources, scrutinized
| by editors, and then released as a complete story. That
| might have meant things like actually interviewing
| people, requesting documents from places, or visiting the
| places in question.
|
| Today, it is just a bunch of people collecting tweets of
| random people on the interwebs. Race to publish before
| competition means there's no time for editorial review of
| simple things like grammar and coherent thoughts let
| alone accuracy, so lots of FUD can be spread very quickly
| as "news".
|
| Those well thought out articles are also considered too
| long and boring and get reposted on socials as TL;DR as
| if it were their own thoughts.
|
| We used to make fun of the microwave generation with "I
| want it now" type comments. Now, it's I need it in less
| than 140chars, or I'm scrolling past it.
|
| The death spiral you describe is like a train wreck that
| you can do nothing about.
| whycome wrote:
| The most infuriating thing is that an article can take
| absolutely any stance on an issue simply by cherry
| picking tweets to go along with it.
|
| News has become a weird kind of curation market. And the
| funny thing about this payment arrangement that
| publishers want is that they are not paying any of those
| tweeters who may be breaking the news or themselves
| curating the info.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why would you pay someone for a tweet? They posted it for
| free. Collecting tweets isn't journalism. Asking the user
| for more than 140 chars about what they are witnessing
| along with multiple others would then be closer to
| journalism. Tweets are just people self identifying who
| journalists could be interviewing. The interview allows
| for follow up to the tweet.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Facts are not copyrightable, so the meat of a story spreads
| quickly and with very little money changing hands. One
| subscriber to the Los Angeles Times can legally and
| immediately share the factual essence of an article via
| social media, personal web site, email, or anything else.
| From there it can be reshared indefinitely. Only people who
| _really_ want to read the original reporting in full will
| pay to subscribe to the LA Times.
|
| There used to be regional/temporal barriers in place before
| the Web was popular; newspapers had geographically limited
| distribution and it took time to print a new edition. One
| newspaper "scooping" another by one day was all it took to
| get people to buy the one-day-earlier publication. Also,
| 20th century newspapers collected significant revenue from
| classified advertising, people buying the paper just to get
| a weather forecast, and other kinds of information
| distribution that really didn't have anything to do with
| investigative news. The Web unbundled all that
| (weather.gov, Craigslist, etc.) and the only remaining
| strength of newspapers was producing original reporting.
| Which, unfortunately, was never all that profitable on its
| own even before you get to the "facts are not
| copyrightable" issue that I mentioned in my first
| paragraph.
| bawolff wrote:
| The value proposition in the internet age is too low to
| demand the price neccessary to support it. This created a
| race to the bottom in order to keep the lights on. This
| further degraded the value of the product. This caused
| people to value it less, and so on.
|
| The end result is reputable news sites became clickbait and
| eventually people stopped caring.
|
| There is still a market for in depth journalism, and we see
| a rise in that sort of things. There are plenty of youtube
| channels doing documentary-like videos on current events.
| That is journalism.
|
| The journalism that is dying is the stuff concentrating on
| breaking news. If its shallow its outcompeted by twitter.
| If its higher quality but still racing to the headline, its
| outcompeted by wikipedia. The fact is the competitors to
| breaking news journalism are cheaper and higher quality.
| CM30 wrote:
| In simple terms; lots of competition and much of it is
| free. If you want basic breaking news, it's all over social
| media (often from the news sites themselves). If you want
| sports, tech, gaming, music, entertainment, art or other
| hobby style news, it's literally on two million websites
| and forums and YouTube channels specifically made for that
| one topic, and usually done better than in a newspaper.
|
| So while you could say a decent chunk of the replacement
| content is worse than what traditional news outlets could
| offer, it's at least free and exists by the bucket load,
| meaning the incentive for paying for it is nonexistent for
| most of the population. Meanwhile the more niche stuff is
| both free and done better elsewhere, so RIP anyone making
| money off that anymore.
|
| To make things tougher, getting advertisers to pay for it
| is becoming a lost cause too, since again, they can
| advertise in places where metrics and tracking options are
| better. They'll get way more bang for their buck on social
| media than they will trying to market on a news site or in
| a classifieds section or what not.
| bombcar wrote:
| Because as much as people like to pretend different, news
| is a form of entertainment.
|
| Everyone loves reading stories that confirm everything they
| already know.
|
| Big real news spreads like wildfire, but news as it is
| consumed is entertainment.
| scelerat wrote:
| I think very few people ever "paid for news" -- the
| newsroom of most publications have always been highly
| subsidized by advertising and classifieds, and perhaps
| newstand sales. Google (and others) and Craigslist (and
| others) quickly dominated advertising and classifieds in
| the early 2000s, and I can't remember the last time I saw
| someone reading a newspaper on a train
| jrpt wrote:
| The circulation subscriptions were a substantial part of
| their revenue, however you're right that ads were even
| larger. I don't think it's fair to say few people ever
| paid for it though. Subscriptions were important too.
| jrpt wrote:
| I think a lot of people are willing to pay for journalism,
| but it has to be journalism above and beyond the basic info
| that you can get for free online. The basic news is
| commoditized and freely available online, and that's what a
| lot of traditional newspapers are competing with. However,
| paid industry journalism like The Information is something
| people are willing to pay for - or get their companies to
| pay for at least.
|
| Also, I think traditional newspapers should position
| themselves so they're _not_ competing with the lowest
| common denominator of basic info, however due to cutbacks,
| most newspapers are in essence not doing very much in depth
| journalism anymore, which means they are unfortunately
| positioning themselves as competing with any other source
| of news.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _free teat to latch on to isn 't the answer_
|
| It's the news sites' content that Google is scraping and
| monetizing. How is it not Google that's latched on to a "free
| teat"?
|
| Serious question. What am I missing?
|
| EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes everyone. I need 'em from
| time-to-time to ensure I've not succumbed to The Matrix.
|
| Of course, you're all wrong. But, keep 'em coming!
| olyjohn wrote:
| Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of
| a symbiotic relationship. Google gets a useful news page,
| the news media get links to their articles.
|
| I honestly could care less about either of them. I think
| they should just fight it out on their own and keep our
| legal system and tax payers time and money out of it.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _Let 's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's
| more of a symbiotic relationship._
|
| There's definitely some symbiosis here, but it seems to
| me that it's ultimately Google that's dependent on the
| news (and other) sites' content, which it gets for free.
| That is, the news sites (and other content providers)
| could exist without Google. But, Google could not exist
| without their content.
|
| At least that's my observation. So, I wasn't picking a
| side as much as earnestly asking how OP concluded that
| its the news sites wanting something free from Google
| versus the other way around.
| whycome wrote:
| Those sites rely on sites like Facebook and Google
| linking to their content to lead readers in. With the ban
| on Canada their public campaign has made that obvious.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _Those sites rely on sites like Facebook and Google
| linking to their content to lead readers in_
|
| Of course, that's the way it is. But, is it a good thing
| that they've intermediated all of the world's content?
|
| It's easy to argue that the problem is exactly that a
| relative handful of sites have a monopoly on traffic and,
| what's more, they've gained that monopoly for free.
| izacus wrote:
| What exactly is being "monetized" when a search result is
| displayed for a news article that will bring the users to
| news site where they'll earn ad money to the news outlet?
|
| The news outlet can use robots.txt to prevent indexing. If
| Google doesn't bring them value, there's the easy answer.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _What exactly is being "monetized" when a search result
| is displayed for a news article_
|
| The article is part of the overall content that Google
| displays in its search results. And, of course, Google
| monetizes its search results with ads.
| notatoad wrote:
| and they should pay for scraping. but that's not what this
| is about, this is about charging for linking to news
| articles.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| > _but that 's not what this is about, this is about
| charging for linking to news articles._
|
| Sure, but these things are directly related. It's the
| scraping that generates the links in question and
| ultimately earns Google ad revenue. And, if they did pay
| on the scraping side, then charging for linking would be
| less relevant. As it is, they're collecting the content,
| but not paying on either end.
|
| So, it seems if you agree they should pay for the
| scraping (but they are not), then you wouldn't be opposed
| to them paying on the other end. In fact, this might be
| fairer to Google b/c it's pay for performance.
|
| But, more to the point, I was responding to OP's
| specific-claim that the news sites were attempting to
| "latch on to a free teat".
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Just to think about this more, are there any other business
| types, besides online news, where your success so radically
| depends on the decisions (read google news ranking and
| summarization algorithms) of some other business that you have
| zero relations with.
|
| Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue
| of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else
| do we see something like this in the economy?
|
| EDIT: the criteria of zero business relationship between your
| entire product class and the Big Business is critical;
| otherwise lots of examples exist.
| jedberg wrote:
| Any retail store. Like Costco and Walmart. They can break an
| entire company by just buying from a competitor.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| There is a business relationship between Walmart/Costco and
| the product or a competitor of the product. In the Google
| News case, there is no business relation with any news site
| (Alphabet ads might have a relation with the news site, but
| that is not Google News).
| izacus wrote:
| Yes, hundreds upon hundreds.
|
| There isn't a single physical product that's not beholden to
| the Walmarts of the world to stock, market and highlight
| those products. There isn't a single farmer in this world
| that isn't dependant on stores buying off their produce and
| putting it into shelves.
|
| Heck, even in paper era, there wasn't a single paper not
| beholden to kiosks and other stores to put their papers into
| racks and into premium places where customers are most likely
| to pick them up. Do you hink NYTimes demanded that street
| vendors pay them for the privilege of putting their paper
| onto a rack?!
|
| Having fully vertically integrated bussiness (like you're
| mentioning) is a very modern development of monopolies.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Newspapers obviously sold their paper to the paper kiosks,
| who then sold it to customers. Hence a business
| relationship between the two types of entities.
|
| In the Google News case, no news sites sells their news to
| Google News. There is no business relation between Google
| News or any de jure contact whatsoever between the two.
| It's different. I am not saying its good or bad, or that
| this gives the right to the news sites for news sites to
| demand payments from Google.
|
| But I think its a weird scenario that doesn't occur in
| other markets. And to understand the pathologies of the
| online news business, we need to think about this
| particular no-relations fact.
| dimator wrote:
| Going back a few decades, newspapers were dependent on the
| newsstands they were sold out of. They could put your paper
| higher or lower on the stand (ranking).
|
| Going back not as far, CNN was dependent on your local cable
| company to deliver their signal to homes. Charter or Comcast
| could choose to stop carrying a channel altogether.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| App developers and Apple/Google
|
| Manufacturers and Retailers
|
| There are lots of examples of people who produce things being
| beholden to a few companies that controls the distribution
| channels.
|
| A more interesting one is small businesses and payment
| processors which don't control the distribution but rather
| keep them operationally dependant on a product they control a
| monopoly over.
| jedberg wrote:
| Consumer reports (both the company and the category). A bad
| review can destroy a company.
|
| Yelp.
|
| TripAdvisor.
| CM30 wrote:
| Virtually every product and service with a website and social
| media presence? If you get banned from Google, your
| visibility online pretty much falls off a cliff and your
| sales will likely never recover. So anyone making money from
| a website is dependent on Google and other search engines...
| well mostly Google indexing said site.
|
| Also, any business whose livelihood depends on a large
| company's platform. Businesses and entrepreneurs selling
| their work on Amazon and eBay, YouTubers and Twitch streamers
| making content for those platforms, influencers in general
| given their reliance on social media services...
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Except for Google search+product combo, in every other
| example you cited there is a contractual relation between
| the product and the SM.
|
| If I have a product page on Facebook, I have a contract
| with Facebook. Facebook could choose to end that contract
| with me and close my account. But Google News
| blocking/downranking a news site does not involve any
| contract ending between Google News and the news site. If I
| don't have a product page on Facebook, Facebook could still
| choose to block/downrank posts where users on their own
| free will mention my product. But I don't think this really
| happens at any significant scale yet.
|
| Same applies your Amazon/Ebay/Youtube/Twitch examples.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| > It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing
|
| Does it? If I summarize a book, do I need to pay a fee? News
| (much like recipes) is not directly covered by copyright (facts
| cannot be copyrighted). Only the expression (exact wording) is
| (which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a
| personal story).
| darby_eight wrote:
| I'm actually ok with this given that google is the source of the
| internet's dependency on advertisements as its sole method of
| reliable income for non-subscribers. They are more than welcome
| to reintroduce less destructive methods of transacting over
| content.
| topspin wrote:
| > given that google is the source of the internet's dependency
| on advertisements
|
| I remember the internet before Google. There were lots of ads.
| It was great watching animated GIF ads load at 56 Kbps. There
| were pop-up adds and crazy obnoxious flashing ads and NSFW ads.
| Google didn't create all of that: the ad-sphere was alive and
| kicking long before anyone heard of Google.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Yes there were obnoxious ads that popped up, but we didn't
| have the same degree of monopolization in platforms or walled
| gardens, and we didn't have so many industries whose
| existence depends on online advertising. Google and
| Facebook's ads may not be as obnoxious but there's more of
| them (look at how many ads there are on search results page)
| and they've affected the viability of many other parts of the
| economy in my opinion.
| darby_eight wrote:
| > Google didn't create all of that: the ad-sphere was alive
| and kicking long before anyone heard of Google.
|
| I never said they did. Hell, print publications were nearly
| as bad as the internet has become--marketing is simply a
| large societal problem we have no solution for. I still place
| the blame for lack of other funding models squarely on them--
| any other funding model would have undercut their entire
| existence, and no other company has had such a profound
| impact on the web (particularly with the demise of netscape).
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Google didn't create all of that
|
| No, they bought it in the form of Doubleclick, and its
| profits supported the rest of their money-losing business. If
| buying Doubleclick doesn't make you responsible for
| Doubleclick, I don't know what does.
|
| People wouldn't tolerate the level of online ad blight we had
| 20 years ago, there are ad-blockers now; the reason Google
| isn't going buckwild with ads is because it _can 't_.
| pompino wrote:
| Google penalizes link-farms, and websites who copy content from
| others, but adopts a holier-than-thou attitude for itself. Not
| very surprising. There is no inherent "legitimacy" when Google
| (as the worlds largest spyware vendor) does it.
| kemayo wrote:
| That seems unrelated to the issue? I don't think those link-
| farms should have to pay to link to things either...
| pompino wrote:
| Yes, but those link-farms get de-ranked by Google (which is a
| good thing IMO). Google is pretending that their particular
| case of linking is legitimate and deserves fair-use
| protection.
| kemayo wrote:
| I don't think Google is pretending. Its linking _is_
| legitimate. Also, it feels strange to draw an equivalence
| between Google downranking a spam website and the
| government charging to link to things.
| pompino wrote:
| There is no difference between content/link farms and
| what Google is doing - its copy/pasting someone else's
| words on a website and surrounding them with ads.
|
| _Neither_ are deserving of fair-use protections.
| kemayo wrote:
| I don't think we're going to agree on this one.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Google News does not show ads.
| netaustin wrote:
| I work in news technology, including with many local news
| organizations, both corporate and independent, including in
| California. Google does not support all news organizations
| equally, and this seems designed to gain some leverage over
| organizations that do get a lot from Google. Their Google News
| Initiative is on its surface just a training platform for
| publishers to learn how to use Google's tools but they've done
| quite a bit more for some publishers. This feels like an attempt
| to gain the vocal support of publishers who have been blessed by
| Google's beneficence, many of which are earnest non-profit
| organizations who might take the bait about big bad hedge funds.
| I don't know how they select who to help and who to ignore and
| our attempts to engage with them on behalf of publishers have had
| mixed results.
|
| But publishers' collective frustration with Google is quite high.
| Given the implications that "it would be a shame if something
| happened to your nice journalism website" coupled with the appeal
| against the big bad hedge funds and ghost papers, it's sort of a
| clever position but I'm not sure it will work.
| arp242 wrote:
| Text of the bill: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB886/id/2832517
| jaredwiener wrote:
| This requires some nuance, since I think it goes beyond a "tax on
| linking," as I have seen it described.
|
| News is a strange product, and one that I think a lot of people
| in tech get wrong. The atomic unit of journalism is not an
| article....it's the reporting. Even deciding to write an article
| is an act based on the analysis of the reporting.
|
| Further, a good headline often tells the story itself -- and that
| is implicitly included when we talk about links. How often have
| you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link? Probably a
| bunch. But you still know OJ died, or the bridge in Baltimore
| collapsed, etc, etc. That level of reporting, the confirmation
| that it happened, all that stuff -- all was expensive, all
| required labor and other resources.
|
| So -- from the consumer perspective, what happens? You get
| clickbait. The publishers have to recoup the expenses somehow,
| and they need you to click through to show you ads, or a paywall.
| "This item in your cabinet could kill you!" Or, they cover the
| site with ads, hoping to get as much out of the few clicks they
| get.
|
| I am not saying this in support of the CJPA, nor in support of
| Google. Just saying this is an existential crisis that came from
| the simple act of aggregation.
|
| (Disclaimer/shameless plug: I'm a former journalist building
| https://www.forth.news, a social-media like news feed for reading
| news. While we are not there yet, our goal is to be able to
| revshare with the reporters/newsrooms who write the stories to be
| able to monetize those headlines.)
| jaredwiener wrote:
| No idea why this is getting downvoted, but would love to hear
| what people think is wrong.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| It's true, journalism is a tough business, but that doesn't
| justify bending the rules in their favor.
|
| Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work,
| companies make money off of your work without paying a dime
| 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing
| companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
|
| In the end, people choose to do open source knowing that
| they're not going to get much money out of it.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| I wasn't advocating for a position -- I also think this law
| will have unintended negative consequences.
|
| My point is simply that this is more than just linking.
| It's a full-on parasitic relationship, where Google (and
| Meta, and others) take the reporting that others are doing
| and build their own traffic off of that, while draining the
| people doing the work dry. News orgs are then faced with a
| terrible choice -- cut off the source of traffic or give it
| away for free. That's different than a dev deciding to open
| source a project.
| hibikir wrote:
| Yes, and it gets even more fun when the source is
| summarizing your page, and feeding it to their AI
| assistant, so they stop sending you much traffic.
|
| The business model of links + ads is going to be more in
| peril in the future than it is today, regardless of the
| regulatory environment. We see the problem all over
| media: If you are relying on google to give you traffic,
| your content better be really cheap and SEO'd to death,
| or be a funnel where most content is hidden, trying to
| drive people into subscriptions. Agglomeration in the
| traffic driving and ad spaces leads to them taking most
| of the profit unless there's agglomeration on the other
| end. Just like in American healthcare, more people using
| the same insurance companies that try to drag
| reimbursement rates down is met by hospital networks
| gobbling up practices and pharmacies, as to get market
| power that the insurer cannot ignore. So we'll see
| situations where, say, Google and the NYT have to decide
| whether the search traffic is worth it, and what's the
| right price for letting the latest AI ingest the entire
| contents of the Times.
|
| It's not about moral good or bad, but about how incentive
| structures leave us with few viable economic models. Both
| software engineers and journalists will change behavior
| to make more money.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think the mistake here is that news orgs are trying to
| invent a business transaction where there isn't any.
| Either what Google/Meta are doing is copyright
| infringement in which case they have to stop or pay to
| license the content itself, or it's not and they're free
| to keep on keeping on. I would be surprised that after 30
| years of public search engines we're just now deciding
| that it's copyright infringement. You could argue the
| summaries are for sure, but regular search results and
| the little context snippets that show what part of the
| article matched your query seem totally fine.
|
| Search engines and social networks don't owe sites they
| link or their users link to any traffic. It would be
| silly to be like, "it's only copyright infringement if
| users don't click through the link enough."
| boplicity wrote:
| > Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work,
| companies make money off of your work without paying a dime
| 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing
| companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
|
| I do think there should be some laws around funding certain
| open source software that has become critical to the
| functioning of society -- whether or not that's paid by tax
| payers in general, or by the companies using that software
| is a different question though.
|
| Government funded open source strikes me as something that
| can very much make sense, in certain cases. Some software
| very much operates at utility scale, and yet, doesn't have
| a funding model beyond the good will of volunteers. This is
| dangerous, and also the type of situation that the
| government exists to solve.
|
| So, yes, companies probably should pay for at least some
| open source software, maybe indirectly through tax, maybe
| through some other mechanism.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the
| open source software they use?
|
| I think that would be an amazing law, actually.
|
| A quasi-tax that affects everyone and helps fund public
| goods is easy to get my support.
|
| But taxing specifically linking by a couple companies is
| not good.
| adra wrote:
| You can make the likely accurate claim that democracy can't
| function without functional, effective independent
| journalism. So how much is it worth requiring so that
| democracy is upheld?
| paxys wrote:
| Nobody is saying this is wrong. However if journalism is so
| valuable then the government (so really, the people) should
| be subsidizing it. Passing illogical laws and putting the
| burden on 2-3 big tech companies makes zero sense.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I downvoted you because I think you provided an overly facile
| explanation that focuses too much on headlines rather than
| the actual issue here.
|
| A headline has always been an attempt to sell an article
| access to headlines and has a long history of freely
| accessible for this reason. Publishers WANT links to their
| article to use their headlines because that is how the
| articles are sold.
|
| You talk about the 'atomic unit of journalism' being
| reporting... but that isn't really a meaningful assertion.
| What is meaningful is that facts are not copyrightable (which
| is good.) If you are selling access to facts as your product,
| you have to differentiate yourself on either storytelling,
| curation or speed.
|
| Notably, the California law covers all links, not just those
| that include a summary or headline.
|
| I don't think the crisis has anything to do with aggregation.
| I think the crisis has to do with how money is spent on
| advertising, how much of that money Google is able to extract
| via their monopoly, and the degree to which we've allowed
| capital markets to gut such a vital institution. I think the
| EFF report linked in the article does a much better job of
| breaking down the issue, even if I don't agree with every
| recommendation it makes or think they are sufficient.
| jaredwiener wrote:
| For the record, I disagree with the bill.
|
| My point is that sharing links is a double edged sword that
| was sort of forced on the news publishers. They've grown
| dependent on the traffic -- and agreed, they need a
| different business model -- but thats tough when anyone
| else can undercut you and publish for free, and then
| compete for that same traffic.
|
| Also, if you think you can differentiate on curation or
| speed, you cannot, because those same links will appear
| regardless.
|
| And yes, the advertising monopoly is a huge part of this --
| but the argument has always been that the search engines
| need news just as much as news needs search engines. But
| they've set up the situation in a way that they have all
| the leverage.
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| > How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on
| the link?
|
| Somewhat related - I have clicked a lot more on Axios articles
| which I know are 2-5 minute reads, compared to other long form
| articles where the author wanted to write a novella. Infact I
| look forward to reading Axios articles which I know are well
| written, compared to others which are of varying quality, so
| less inclination to click.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on
| the link? Probably a bunch.
|
| How often did the news service that published that headline
| also break the story vs acquired it from AP or another wire
| service?
|
| I pay for NYT, WSJ and local news because I want news companies
| to exist. But news companies have a huge anti-tech bias
| (because they compete for ad revenue). NYT explicitly had a "no
| good news on tech" policy for a while (still?). There is a
| missing business model for news because it's hard to monetize,
| and information is free. Society should figure this out, and
| establish its values - but trying to pretend that google search
| results (or Facebook posts) are the evil villain killing news
| _instead of the free movement of information on the internet at
| large_ is naive.
| kevincox wrote:
| If they don't think that Google is giving them a good deal they
| can simply opt-out of the index. But they don't want to do
| that, because Google is giving them value.
|
| This is their method of side-channeling an "unfair" deal. If
| they actually wanted a fair negotiation they would just go to
| Google directly and say "we will opt out of indexing unless you
| pay us $X". But they think they can get more money by lobbying
| a law to force Google to accept a better deal.
| dang wrote:
| The Google post is at
| https://blog.google/products/news/california-journalism-pres...
| (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015355, but I merged
| that thread hither since this article has more background).
|
| Also:
|
| _California Assembly votes to pass the Journalism Preservation
| Act_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36165322 - June 2023
| (99 comments)
|
| _Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off news in
| California_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36148877 -
| June 2023 (27 comments)
|
| _Can the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act preserve
| local journalism?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27943976 - July 2021 (1
| comment)
| skynetv2 wrote:
| This is just another non-sensical law that allows the dying news
| publishers to shakedown other successful companies. News
| publishers have to evolve. NYT did a wonderful turnaround, as an
| example.
| setgree wrote:
| This threat is credible: Google shut off Spain's access to Google
| News for eight years for similar reasons [0].
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-news-re-opens-
| spai...
| LegitShady wrote:
| Meanwhile in Canada...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/29/google-ca...
|
| Although facebook/insta did refuse to be blackmailed, and many
| canadian news orgs are actually harmed by this sort of bullshit
| link taxing because their media can't be shared on facebook
| anymore, where a lot of older news watchers get their news
|
| https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availabili...
| r00fus wrote:
| So essentially Canada gets to subsidize news outlets by
| having Google pay for them as a yearly subscription.
|
| No link tax, just a tax for news.
|
| Sounds... reasonable?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Google and Meta had each been funding journalism -- actual
| journalism, not vulture capital clickbait -- voluntarily,
| which they are now not. Google is now paying $100m, most of
| which goes to huge corporations. Meta pulled out
| altogether, slashing traffic to canadian media sites by
| half.
| bloppe wrote:
| This tax applies only to Google. It doesn't apply to any
| other tech company, and it never will. The DMA at least
| provides more-or-less objective criteria for what
| constitutes a "gatekeeper", but this is literally a private
| deal between Canada and Google.
|
| I don't have a problem with publishers getting a greater
| share of ad revenue, but there are better ways to do it.
| The govt could increase taxes on ad exchanges categorically
| (still effectively a tax on Google and Facebook) and give
| publishers tax breaks. That would have the same effect but
| be way more reasonable.
| ikidd wrote:
| It applied to Facebook/Meta and any larger social media
| sites. Meta just shut it down and any direct
| contributions to journalism that they were making, and
| now the publishers are crying because their traffic has
| plummetted, to the surprise of precisely nobody except
| them.
|
| Not sure where you're getting your information.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The proposed California law applies only to sites with 1
| billion MAU and sales or market cap over $550 billion. It
| only applies to Alphabet and Meta.
| bloppe wrote:
| I'm talking about the Guardian article in the grandparent
| comment. It's a private deal between Google and the
| Canadian govt.
| LegitShady wrote:
| There is no such thing as a private deal with the
| government that is extorting you for money to give to
| legacy media companies.
|
| It's like calling armed robbery by a cop under official
| orders by the president a private deal. Not a thing.
| karaterobot wrote:
| It's not healthy for news outlets to depend on being
| subsidized. Or, more accurately: it's not healthy for
| _every_ news outlet to be subsidized by the same source,
| especially in this sorta roundabout way that can be pulled
| out from under them with a single decision by Google. If I
| 've come to one conclusion about professional news in the
| last 25 years, it's that they need to control their source
| of revenue and not depend on being a vassal of big tech.
| Our ability to get quality journalism shouldn't require a
| FAANG company to provide the necessary resources; not
| distribution, not editorial, not financial.
| Anduia wrote:
| They reopened in Spain now that they can _"reach individual or
| group agreements with publishers"_, which makes sense if you
| believe that asking the publisher before summarizing their
| content is the right thing to do.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| That sounds like the threat _isn 't_ credible because they came
| back.
| paxys wrote:
| They came back after the law was repealed.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Citation? I'm not seeing that anywhere.
| paxys wrote:
| What sources are you looking at?
| kerkeslager wrote:
| I'm not playing this game. I'm not claiming that the law
| was or wasn't repealed; I don't know. You're the one
| making the claim that it was repealed. Cite a source or
| you're just making things up.
| paxys wrote:
| You saying "I'm not seeing that anywhere" assumes you
| made the effort to look. People aren't going to do the
| homework for you. I don't have anything to prove. Google
| it and click the first result.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > You saying "I'm not seeing that anywhere" assumes you
| made the effort to look.
|
| I did, and it's not a good faith argument to claim
| otherwise.
|
| > People aren't going to do the homework for you.
|
| You're the one making the claim. It's _your_ homework,
| not mine.
|
| > I don't have anything to prove.
|
| You made a claim, so it is in fact yours to prove.
|
| Given your refusal to back up your claim, it's beginning
| to look like you are just lying.
|
| EDIT: I _am_ seeing that there was an adoption of an EU
| regulation which modified the law, not repealed it, which
| is pretty different from the claim you 're making[1]:
|
| > BRUSSELS, June 22 (Reuters) - Alphabet (GOOGL.O) ,
| opens new tab reopened Google News in Spain on Wednesday,
| eight years after it shut down the service because of a
| Spanish rule forcing the company and other news
| aggregators to pay publishers for using snippets of their
| news.
|
| > Madrid last year transposed European Union copyright
| rules, revamped in 2020, into legislation, allowing media
| outlets to negotiate directly with the tech giant.
|
| To be clear: Google is still required to pay publishers
| in Spain: the change is that the price is negotiable.
|
| So, it's becoming clear now why you refused to link a
| source: because you are wrong. And since now I _am_
| making a claim, I 'm linking it:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-news-re-opens-
| spai...
|
| You know, the link upthread.
| jsight wrote:
| IIRC, Bard was limited in Canada due to some similar provisions?
| I wonder if this will have impact on their LLM access in
| California as well.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| Copyright laws are already strict enough in favor of the rights
| holders. Don't we all agree on that?
|
| Bills like this are like copyright law on steroids, making
| copyright holders even more powerful than they already are.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Eventually, of course, it will "only be fair" that we should
| pay a tax to speak about the news at all, to anyone. Or at
| least to submit what we plan to say about the news to the
| approval committee.
|
| Cass Sunstein is a pioneer.
| duringmath wrote:
| Private equity firms are buying up local news outfits then lobby
| to force google/fb to pay up. It's an extortion racket which news
| outlets refuse to cover for some reason.
| paxys wrote:
| People were predicting this would happen when Google caved and
| started paying "link tax" to Australia and Canada and other
| jurisdictions with similar laws. Now - to no surprise - every
| government (really every media conglomerate lobbying arm) around
| the world wants the free money and so more such laws are popping
| up.
| tomComb wrote:
| Dunno about Australia but Google 'won' in Canada, where the
| government agreed to accept what Google had originally offered,
| and make it up to their corporate media buddies in the
| following budget.
| paxys wrote:
| It ended with a negotiation and Google agreeing to pay $100M+
| annually to Canadian news organizations, so I wouldn't
| exactly call that a "win" for them.
| Aerroon wrote:
| It might be a win for Google.
|
| >Oh, you posted this story we really didn't like. Sorry,
| this month's check got lost in the mail. We'll sort it out
| in 6-15 business days.
|
| Businesses eventually become reliant on significant revenue
| streams which gives the party that provides them power over
| the business.
|
| It might not even be Google doing anything nefarious, just
| a case of "sorry, but our business is doing poorly and we
| might have to shut down Google News and stop paying if this
| keeps up."
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| In Australia there were concessions where the Australian gov
| of the time thought that having Google negotiate an agreement
| only with the major outlets (Rupert Murdoch) was acceptable
| so they don't pay every paper, just the ones that agree with
| the Liberal party (a right wing party) viewpoints.
|
| The liberal party is now out of power but the labor party has
| no courage to stand up to Murdoch to repeal this.
|
| It was all very clever and basically a way to fund right wing
| media in Australia via big tech. Blatantly corrupt as fuck
| and people need to be arrested for what went on to create
| this law but definitely clever.
| johnea wrote:
| If you're using goggle as your news source, you're already
| assimilated...
|
| I'd be happy if the entire goggle corps left California: take my
| monopoly, please...
| standardUser wrote:
| I would hope most consumers of news understand the difference
| between a source and an aggregator.
| kube-system wrote:
| I don't think most consumers of news content really think
| about the difference between a source, a syndicate, or an
| aggregator. And a significant portion likely don't know the
| difference. Media literacy is a significant problem, both in
| the US and in many parts of the world.
| M4rkJW wrote:
| "It's well known that people are getting news from sources like
| short-form video, topical newsletters, social media, and curated
| podcasts, and many are avoiding the news entirely. In line with
| those trends, just 2% of queries on Google Search are news-
| related. Nevertheless, we want to continue making targeted
| contributions to the news ecosystem to help news publishers
| navigate this inflection point."
|
| Google acknowledges they had a part to play in causing the
| collapse of journalism but has no solutions to offer.
|
| People aren't consuming news, and when they do they choose the
| least accurate, most entertaining sources for it. Newspapers and
| local broadcasters are suffering because the public has lost the
| will or the capacity to focus. When will we start seeing white
| box Surgeon General warnings on Tiktok and Youtube that remind
| the user prolonged exposure can cause serious mental health
| issues? [1] Where's the DARE school-visit campaigns to remind
| kids that broadcast news is free over the air and their parents
| are chumps for paying streaming services' subscription fees?
|
| [1]: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/23/surgeon-general-
| is...
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > When will we start seeing white box Surgeon General warnings
| on Tiktok and Youtube that remind the user prolonged exposure
| can cause serious mental health issues?
|
| We won't (or if we do they won't accomplish anything), because
| once you've moved to a low-trust society, which we are rapidly
| doing, any official statements telling you which information to
| consume/avoid are seen as Enemy Action and make you trust your
| outside sources even harder. You can find tons of Zoomers
| saying they get news from Tiktok specifically because it's not
| under the control of The Man (even though it's controlled by
| the Chinese government, the ultimate The Man). There are no
| easy fixes here.
| paxys wrote:
| I wonder if these media conglomerates think the same laws should
| apply to them. If your news article has any linked information in
| it, you need to pay money to the owner of that link every time
| your article is opened. Seems only fair.
| wmf wrote:
| They never link out though.
| whycome wrote:
| That's also absurd that modern news sites think they are so
| trustworthy that they don't even bother to cite or link to
| the studies or subjects they're talking about. Sometimes it's
| a bit insane when wikipedia only requires a link to a news
| site to consider something verified.
| tekla wrote:
| Cool cut them off.
| schnable wrote:
| Why is this done as a law rather than negotiated by the media
| outlets?
| wmf wrote:
| They have no leverage to negotiate with.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Isn't the issue that Google links to websites and then reduces
| their commercial viability by showing summaries in search pages
| or by having their AI present the data without letting the
| website get the traffic? If so, I think a link tax is justified.
| At that point, Google is creating value for itself by removing
| value from others so it seems fair to me. And we don't need the
| law to be perfect - let's just make it applicable to companies
| with market capitalization above 100 billion.
|
| But more than this, the big tech companies are just too powerful
| and their mere existence is anti competitive. I think _that_
| issue needs to be addressed independent of media outlets
| specifically. For example with AI, big tech companies are in a
| position to put themselves first in front of customers and
| prevent any smaller players from competing for users and market
| share. Now Apple and Microsoft are forcing their AI agents onto
| phones and computers, and potentially violating privacy of users
| and using all their data for training or other purposes. We've
| seen such a long history of anti competitive practices from these
| companies, and rather than dealing with performative court cases
| that drag out for years, we need to deal with the fact that
| they're too big. They need to be split up. Or maybe just get
| taxed more compared to everyone else.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > For example with AI, big tech companies are in a position to
| put themselves first in front of customers and prevent any
| smaller players from competing for users and market share.
|
| This has already been the case for >10 years.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I agree. But it still has not been fixed or even acknowledged
| broadly. And with each new successive wave of innovation
| (like AI), it seems they are able to simply take up all the
| profits that could exist, without working hard and competing
| fairly for it.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| My understanding is you have to ask to be in the news wheel.
|
| Anyone can ask to be removed from the index. The internet is
| old enough that it has long been standard that search is opt
| out, when you are part of the World Wide Web.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Does that matter though? If they control the means of getting
| to the user for entire segments, it makes alternatives less
| viable. Users don't have much choice (it's not like there is
| another competing news UI element that a user can choose to
| occupy those parts of the screen) and there isn't really fair
| competition.
| kemayo wrote:
| Can't speak for what Google plans to do in the future, but
| _currently_ news results in search can either be a "top
| stories" block at the top of the results, or regular search
| results. In "top stories" you get just the headline and maybe
| an associated picture. In regular search results you get the
| headline, and a fragment of the first sentence of the article.
|
| If seeing the headline and maybe a tiny fragment of the first
| words is enough to remove commercial viability, there's a lot
| of things that do that. _Physical_ newspapers /magazines are
| generally displayed in a way that provides that information,
| for instance.
|
| I'm sure there are people who search, see the headline, and
| don't click through. But the counterargument is that other
| people _do_ click through, and without the search results then
| the news website wouldn 't have received any of that traffic.
|
| Perhaps-ironically, it looks like a full AI-synthesis approach
| would be a way to get around paying the news orgs under this
| law. If the Google results just give a synthesized blend of
| news from across the web without linking to anything in
| particular...
| whycome wrote:
| > If seeing the headline and maybe a tiny fragment of the
| first words is enough to remove commercial viability, there's
| a lot of things that do that.
|
| Heck, that's what twitter is great at. If there's a news
| story, you can get the gist pretty quickly on there.
| megabytemike wrote:
| Agree that charging on a link is bad. I'd even argue, that if
| you are going to charge for linking to an article, then I'd
| expect no ads on that site.
|
| But, anything beyond a link starts to open up questions for me.
|
| Who even uses Google's AI summarize feature for articles? For
| me, most of the time it's been because the pop-up for it jumped
| in the way for me and it was an accidental click. When I have
| intentionally used it, it's been a pretty poor summary and
| misses key nuances that make the article unique compared to
| other publishers.
|
| Taking a step back further, I don't know who is asking for this
| feature. What's the target market here?
|
| Also, perhaps I'm wrong here but I don't think anyone would
| want an AI summarized version of other types of media like
| songs or movies.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > If so, I think a link tax is justified.
|
| I disagree, a "link tax" is the _wrong response_ , and one
| which is incredibly dangerous to a free/distributed internet:
| Once it exists in principle its scope will _not_ remain limited
| to affecting only big unsympathetic search-engine companies. Do
| you want some future HN to put up ads to pay its link-tax?
|
| If a source-page with a link is "summarizing" too much about
| the destination, then there's already a mechanism for that
| called "sue them for copyright infringement."
| philip1209 wrote:
| This is a perfect example of Regulatory Capture:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
| coretx wrote:
| And Rent-Seeking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
| WalterBright wrote:
| With the increasing shift of media companies from reporting the
| news to selling an ideology, they should be welcoming people
| linking to it and summarizing their sales pitch.
|
| https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...
| wewtyflakes wrote:
| Seems weird that if someone links to a news site, that the news
| site gets to double-dip advertising revenue, since it gets to
| advertise on its own site, and also get a cut of the advertising
| revenue of someone that linked to them. It will either mean
| everyone will want to classify themselves as news sites, or,
| people that link to them will no longer want to drive revenue via
| ads.
| franze wrote:
| Just do it!
| tomcar288 wrote:
| why can't the news outlets just charge people when they arrive on
| the site? just paywall it and let people read the article for
| like 5 cents or something?
|
| i know this has been tried and supossedly didn't work. but why
| not? I would gladly be willing to pay 5 cents to read an article
| I like but I sure as hell am not going to shell out 250$+ yearly
| subscription for it (just to read one article), like most news
| sites do these days.
| paxys wrote:
| Because news organizations are used to double and triple
| dipping (get revenue from subscriptions, from advertising, and
| now from incoming links), and when things didn't go their way
| they are using their enormous lobbying power to force it to be
| so.
| sattoshi wrote:
| Canada hit Meta with a similar law with the same, predictable
| result. It's hard to not be cynical and thinking that the current
| government wants people to be less informed, as it hurts them in
| the polling.
| whoitwas wrote:
| This sort of legislation makes no sense, shows how out of touch
| regulators are with tech, and does the opposite of their intent
| as tech companies simply don't link the content.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| There's an inconvenient fact that Google prefers to ignore:
|
| -- Frequently, the headline and snippet is all you need.
| "Inflation still at 3%" is often enough for a lot of readers. An
| awful lot of them aren't going to follow the link.
|
| Yes, they _are_ trying to preserve a business model that doesn 't
| work, but that doesn't mean they have to provide free services to
| any and all. If Google just had a link labelled "News on
| Inflation" the paper would probably be happy.
|
| "You can just use robots.txt if you don't want to be crawled" is
| a canard. You can just not have a website, too.
| dweymouth wrote:
| If you're a news site and you want Google to have a link like
| "News on Inflation", then just give your article the title
| "Unpacking the latest inflation data" and save the actual info
| for the article itself. A lot of internet publishers have
| already figured this out and it's why you see titles like
| "These 3 states have the most affordable homes" that just
| entice you to click on the link.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| the problem is, they also want the headline to entice people
| to buy the paper. Contradictory desires.
| melodyogonna wrote:
| I don't understand this. How does Google owe them billions if it
| doesn't host ads on Google News and instead pushes traffic to
| publishers?
| javier_e06 wrote:
| I agree with California. Just like other computer data brokers,
| Google services benefit from content creators not all the way
| around. Pay the human content creators.
| paxys wrote:
| "The news media industry is dying because of tech" is a massively
| successful myth perpetuated by the news media industry.
|
| Back in the day before tech platforms there used to be 5
| successful news companies and 5 failing ones. Today there are 5
| successful news companies and 500 failing ones. Tech reduced the
| barriers to entry and made the playing field more level, giving
| rise to smaller publications and indie journalism. But the
| appetite for news consumption is still the same, so _everyone_
| can 't be successful.
|
| Lobbying and passing rent-seeking laws only helps the
| conglomerates on the top.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > "The news media industry is dying because of tech" is a
| massively successful myth perpetuated by the news media
| industry.
|
| Why do you think that's a myth? The news industry was always
| reliant on advertising for revenue. The tech giants of the
| Internet era all figured out how to better target
| advertisements, so a huge amount of that advertising money
| shifted from news to tech giants (and not just tech "giants" -
| Craigslist basically killed classified ads, and Craigslist
| isn't exactly a "giant").
|
| I don't really know if the news media industry is "dying", but
| of course tech was hugely instrumental in reducing the overall
| amount of revenue that goes to journalism.
| paxys wrote:
| The news industry is still getting money via ads, same as
| before. The only thing that has changed is the broker that is
| connecting them to the advertisers. Print media had its own
| ad ecosystem, and the online one is controlled by Google and
| Facebook (but of course the media companies can use whoever
| they want or even talk to advertisers directly). So what is
| the complaint exactly? That Google shouldn't take a cut?
| Except that the law isn't even about advertising, it's about
| link aggregation (which Google also happens to do, but that
| is completely separate from its advertising arm).
| PeterisP wrote:
| No, the news industry isn't still getting money same as
| before - the total ad revenue the industry is getting has
| significantly decreased.
|
| Newspaper ad revenue has simply collapsed
| (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2023/11/28/audiences...) and it's not being replaced
| by digital media as digital ad revenue for news industry
| (as opposed to total digital ad revenue) is shrinking every
| year.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| AFAIK, the news media is dying because it was taken over by
| malicious short-term focused MBAs that turned all of it into
| crap.
|
| Honestly, I don't know what 5 successful companies you are
| talking about, but it's true that it's being replaced by lots
| and lots of small players that don't look anything like "big
| journalism".
| codexb wrote:
| Yes and no. There were thousands of moderately successful local
| papers that really don't exist anymore. They had a handful of
| different revenue streams (classifieds, real estate and auto
| sales ads) that have all been gradually eaten into by internet
| competition.
| alecnotthompson wrote:
| The problem with everything is capitalism
| bilvar wrote:
| *yawn*
| tehjoker wrote:
| The US is worried that if even private journalistic entities are
| strangled to death, then it will have to stand up a national news
| service like the BBC and won't be immune from the "state
| sponsored news" label it loves to apply to other countries.
|
| However, Google's interest, despite being entangled with the US
| quite deeply, is to not spend money to save the ecosystem. Most
| likely, they have their own plan for this eventuality. After all,
| if they would be single-handedly supporting multiple news
| companies, why shouldn't it be its own mega-news company and keep
| the additional revenues?
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I have sympathy for news publishers but I worry a lot about the
| principle of asserting that _linking to something_ is an act that
| the link target has proprietary rights to over. At some level, it
| is almost a free speech issue. If I can 't refer to what you are
| saying, without owing you something, you have power over not just
| my speech, but a power to limit how your work is subjected to
| criticism and debate. It's effectively an extension of copyright
| law to expand copyright holder's rights.
|
| Obviously all this is hyperbolic based the actual text of the
| law. The law doesn't directly apply any sort of link tax, and it
| is shamelessly targeted only at Google and Facebook (to the point
| that they wrote Facebook in there by name, which is kind of
| stupid if you ask me). But if you drill into the reasoning it
| hits at the foundational level on this basic logic, and it's
| pretty concerning if we assume then that this _will_ be
| significantly extrapolated and expanded - as has been the history
| with all other aspects of copyright in the past.
|
| Honestly I would rather that governments come clean and just
| admit that the problem they are trying to solve is actually a
| "social good" outcome, and therefore directly tax the platforms
| and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government
| for news journalism themselves. Trying to artificially construct
| that through introduction of significant new precedents in
| copyright law engenders huge risks of unintended consequences and
| potential future extrapolation and abuse of this principle.
| notatoad wrote:
| >I have sympathy for news publishers
|
| i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have
| sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but
| _news publishers_ have spent the last couple decades making
| their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody
| links to an article externally there 's almost no point in
| going to their site directly. And even after you've followed
| that link it's almost impossible to read an article around the
| ads, login prompts, and chumboxes. News websites are terrible,
| and it's their own fault. Giving them more money to do the
| thing they've spent so long failing at isn't going to solve
| this problem.
|
| >directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue
| to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
|
| yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding
| journalism. a link tax that gets paid out to news sites only
| incentivizes them to do the bare minimum amount of journalism
| to still qualify as a news site, and then fill up the rest of
| the site with SEO clickbait to maximize their clicks for the
| link tax.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault.
|
| To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them
| to play.
|
| > make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
|
| I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing
| articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging
| interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street
| work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund
| can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts
| is beyond me.
|
| Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial
| process?
|
| The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast
| have traditionally had very strong commission based internal
| sales operations. They have the people to go out, get
| advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the
| advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or
| retarget this staff for the new market place.
|
| Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with
| Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.
| izacus wrote:
| > To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked
| them to play.
|
| This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with
| popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage.
|
| Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS
| either and Google didn't force them to do that either.
|
| Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news
| industry, they did it to themselves.
| babypuncher wrote:
| If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you.
|
| Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them
| so that most people never even need to click the link. Google
| is getting most of the value from the articles written while
| not doing the actual work to make them.
|
| The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social
| media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere.
|
| It's worse in places like Facebook where they actively don't
| want you to actually follow the link. Facebook wants you to
| leave a like or a comment right there under the preview, then
| keep scrolling.
| bawolff wrote:
| To be fair - that's what news sites do - they summarize
| information happening elsewhere.
|
| Its hard to claim google is in the wrong for doing to news
| sites what news sites have been doing to other people since
| forever.
| ninkendo wrote:
| At some point someone is actually doing journalism though
| (in the best case at least.) News outlets that summarize
| things from e.g. Reuters or AP tend to have agreements
| which pay money for the information. You could reasonably
| argue that google should be doing the same, right?
| izacus wrote:
| Whoever is doing journalism, it's not those sites that
| now want a governmental tax handout to continue being
| bad.
| bbarnett wrote:
| If Google was doing what news sites did, it would have
| journalists writing articles, researching data,
| investigating, etc. Yet they do _none of that_.
|
| Your statement is absurd.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with that. Only expression is covered
| by copyright; re-interpretation/summarizing isn't.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I don't think the law (from what I read of it) actually does
| target that though. Might as well cite it rather than refer
| to it in the abstract:
|
| > The total number of the covered platform's internet web
| pages displayed or presented to California residents during
| the month that link to, display, or present the eligible
| digital journalism provider's news articles, works of
| journalism, or other content, or portions thereof.
|
| Google can remove all the summaries and the law will apply
| just as much. In fact, from my reading of it, in other parts
| they are actually referring to "impressions" as the driver;
| that is it's explicitly the _click through_ that they are
| asserting provides the value to Google, not the prevention of
| click through.
|
| I get that emotionally, it's the prevention of click through
| that feels injurious, but it doesn't read as the spirit of
| this to me. I think possibly they know that if they didn't
| fully scope in links here Google would immediately just
| reduce it to raw links and this _would_ reduce click through
| and it would hurt the intended beneficiaries of this more
| than it helps them.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Maybe this isn't quite the same thing, but I had been
| threatened with legal action in the past for linking to a
| site's public assets:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26550846
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Can't news outlets just throw up a robots.txt and then charge for
| access to their sites? unless they're incapable of producing
| content people are willing to pay for and actually ~want~ need
| Google to drive traffic...
| spaceguillotine wrote:
| Google: We can only exist on the free labor of others at every
| turn.
| brevitea wrote:
| Is Brave or Firefox doing away with news? How about Hacker News?
| If not, I'm not worried about Google cutting off anything. Google
| is only illustrating why depending on them for "truth" is a thing
| of the past. Same for Meta.
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