The entire point of art. 11 is to transfer money from Google News (and other aggregators, like Facebook) to publishers. This also covers search.
The latest version of Google News has already solved this: it only shows the title and the image, not a single sentence from the article itself, – which was the main concern in Spain and Germany when the relevant laws were introduced.
Facebook and Twitter shouldn't face any issues as well, because they only display the value of the og:description meta tag, set by the publishers themselves.
[1] http://ogp.me/
and than, should they force google to pay instead of cutting these publishers off? in no way would that be legal. you can't force somebody to pay something, by forcing them to obey.
That's the expected (and fair) outcome. To be fair, why should a multinational be entitled to profit from unauthirized access and distribution of third-party content while the content creators are left with the bill of creating it?
Why should news organizations be entitled to profit from unauthorized access and distribution of third-party content while the creators are left with the bill of creating it? Shouldn't they be paying the celebrities they gossip about for doing all the "noteworthy" things they do and giving them something to drive readership with?
The obvious flaw is that it's a symbiotic relationship. News organizations want traffic from Google in the way that celebrities and companies and politicians want news coverage (in the "no such thing as bad press" sense). They see Google's market cap and think they're making all this money, but the money isn't from news aggregation. That's peanuts. And if you're making a dime and they're making a nickel and you demand a dollar more, you don't get a dollar more, you get a dime less.
That's a good question, and it seems to me that's the whole point of this legislation.
Currently there is a mega-multinational company which posts record profits for services that consist of scraping and unauthorized distribution of third-party content, and in a manner that even eliminates any traffic from the content creator's site.
So in the current state of affairs only the scraper gets paid, and the content creators are left with the bill.
How is that fair?
> Why should news organizations be entitled to profit from unauthorized access and distribution of third-party content while the creators are left with the bill of creating it?
For some reason you've invented this silly idea that researching and developing a newspiece is, somehow, the same as scraping websites.
I'm sure that we can agree that journalism and web scraping have nothing in common, just like xeroxing a book is not the same thing as writing a novel.
Not true at all. They actually increase traffic. https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-google-news-effect-spain-r...
And you seem to have developed your own silly idea that quoting one or two sentences of a news piece is the same as xeroxing it.
Googlebot respects robots.txt. Anyone who doesn't want to be indexed, isn't. For some reason they still seem to want to be.
> I'm sure that we can agree that journalism and web scraping have nothing in common, just like xeroxing a book is not the same thing as writing a novel.
What do you mean? It's basically the same thing. When a reporter interviews some guy, they put his words in their story -- without compensation. How is that fair?
Are you referring to wholesale reproduction of the content?
Or hyperlinks and short excerpts?
I'm quite convinced that people wanting micropayments to be solved are pretty much like friends who say they would give you money if they won the lottery. In other words, these are people who just don't want to do anything for you, but don't want to admit to that. So they latch onto some implausible scenario and enthusiastically swear up and down that should lightening strike, they will absolutely do X, knowing the odds are very long against that happening.
How exactly is it "unauthorized"?
Google got a free license in Germany while Yahoo did not. Even if they ban the free license (which is a whole nother set of even bigger problems) Google can just not list them at all. It's not like they care about Google News all that much.
The problem is, what revenue? News aggregation is not a huge profit center to begin with. Then you take that already-small amount of money and split it between thousands of independent news organizations, each of which requires its own transaction costs, and the transaction costs sink the whole enterprise.
They own the most, but it's not 80% (perhaps they cover 80% of listening markets). They own about 850 stations[1] out of roughly 10,000 commercial stations[2]. However, your point does stand as the second largest owner, Cumulus Media at 455 stations also filed for bankruptcy[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHeartMedia [2] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-352168A1.pdf [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/business/media/iheartmedi...
Honestly, it doesn't seem a bad thing to me. But lat's see how Google plays it out.
I mean, I think the link tax is backwards, but a vague emotional appeal to the health of... a mom and pop internet news site...(?) is not the argument I'd use.
In this scenario, I'm not sure if society should encourage little mom and pop scrapers to spawn while leaving the people who actually created the content with any way to protect their work.
"Publishers" (newspapers) are 99% simply reprinting news they get from "the wire" (Reuters for example, or Bloomberg, or ...), or a few wire services. One way to look at Facebook and Google News is that they are better versions of these wires, available for end users of the content instead of just paying subscribers (Reuters' wire is a subscription service)
The way it works is this: let's say I feel the need to put out a press release. I have an employee write the news (heavily favoring me) and "put out the press release", meaning I submit the article to a news agency [1], including image and text online, paying 35$ for the privilege of having it appear on the feeds newspapers use to put out news. This is why even the BBC is full of "researchers working for IBM have saved the world again".
There are a number of issues. Of course 99% of the news is not exactly neutral or even a little bit researched, because it's just press releases. 1% is, but is produced by reporters working for the news agencies (only huge places like BBC still have their own reporters). And Google is a lot better than even the BBC (which is very high quality) at finding and presenting press releases to the public. Hell, it's actually better at deciding the trustworthiness of them than news desks (mostly because they, for profit reasons, refuse to give humans even half an hour to check things). Furthermore, those algorithms run so cheaply that they actually provide a personalized version of the news of the day based on both your interests and the news. I assume Jeff Bezos has the same service by a newspapers, but I imagine few others do.
So the underlying issue newspapers are having is "Google automated and Facebook crowdsources what we do, and their automated algorithms are much more successful than our humans, please outlaw them".
> To be fair, google and the like have been living off scraping third-party content and making it available in a way that only the scrapers see any traffic from that content, thus earn anything that is there to be earned.
Yeah there is no value at all in having a searchable index, content summaries, and it's unfair that people get paid for that. Furthermore newspapers just use humans to do what Google news does with algorithms. Never mind that that's what people want.
And as pointed out, people see more value in the aggregated, summarized and algorithmically curated versions of the same data.
Did you ever use the phonebook ? Did it have ads or not ? Should we outlaw the phonebook too ? Did you ever use an encyclopedia or a dictionary ? Did you pay for it ?
I feel like your argument has some shortcomings.
HN runs on one server and is moderated by just a couple of people typically. It is in fact the definition of a mom & pop operation. It does not have a zillion dollar budget, either for operations or promoting itself. It doesn't need it, the value proposition is the content, community and standards.
I can semi-trivially set up an HN clone for any given industry or concept. It'll be up to me to promote it and garner attention to it, however the point is that it's extremely inexpensive and easy (few regulations, hurdles, compliance issues, etc) to open up that type of expression platform. That's what the parent is referring to.
There are a lot of IT people here. This, unfortunately, sometimes convinces some individuals that that's all there is here, which is an inaccurate assumption.
The internet has the attention economy, which follows a power law of popularity, with a long tail of unpopular content that has <50 readers. I would not consider that 'prosperous'.