Google may shut down its news service in Europe

Of course it would help a lot if they also dramatically revised the way they offer their content on the internet. Many news sites are rather awful.

The only news services that would survive this regulation are the public/subsidized ones, pretty much. Maybe that's exactly the goal: eliminate independent press.

Let's begin with shadow profiles of non users. Despite the fact that I didn't sign up they still store my data and track me.

Facebook being abused as a conduit to manipulate elections and as means for nefarious propaganda concerns all of us. You don't need to be a Facebook user to be directly impacted by the toxic effects of populism on society fostered by them

Further, it's a poison to society by allowing hate speech (but not pictures of breast feeding mothers) to be disseminated on a massive scale

As a human being it concerns me when Facebook is used to support genocide and to aid an abet the silencing of critics in countries like Cambodia or The Philippines

As a Jew I feel personally attacked when the highest echelons of the company blow the most vile, antisemtic dog whistles currently available

I believe that all those things (and much more) affects my life a lot more than people driving BMWs.

I call it greed because news websites have always had the option to exclude themselves from Google if they want to. But they don't, because it's actually a net positive for them. They just want Google's money on top of that.

Google probably does gain from people logging in (though you can use Google News without logging in, it probably does cause people to log in, even if just a little more).

If the newspaper has ads from Google, then Google does take a cut (that's the business logic), and arguably Google News is similar to the newspaper buying ads on Google Search, except they don't have to pay.

People do pay for Google Search ads to drive traffic to their site, and for newspapers that probably gives them ad revenue and signups.

Newspapers get a similar service from Google News for free.

"Should Google (or anyone else) pay newspapers in order to run a news aggregation service" really boils down to "how much $ is a login worth to Google"?

It becomes a formula:

Google News value to google = google_news_users_per_month * fraction_not_logged_in * fraction_who log_in_because_of_google_news * value_of_a_login_to_google

Let's guess some numbers:

1M * 0.7 * 0.2 * $0.01 = $1400 per month

If Google has to pay developers, server infrastructure, AND newspapers more than $1400 then Google loses money on this and SHOULD turn down the product. I say this as a shareholder of GOOG: If it doesn't make financial sense then stop wasting my money.

(but yes, there's also brand value)

PS: Yes, there's one more value to Google, and that's the general: "More Internet use is a benefit to Google because any increase of Internet use will have a fraction on it go to sites that have Google ads on them". But saying that's bad is as if Google were to give free Internet, and people would demand that Google pay to give free Internet to people, because users would browse to sites where many of them would have Google ads on them.

The EU has also funded flood prevention programs in the UK while our own government has done naff all aside appearing for rhetoric soundbites.

Much of what the EU does goes unsung. And a lot of stuff gets completely misreported too (eg the whole bent bananas meme). In fact this has become so common that there's a coined term for it: euromyth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromyth)

The EU or its parliament do not benefit from this at all. Except that when this is over, hopefully they've finally learned not to let lobbyists set policy.

Both Google and such a magazine store are middlemen do work to add value and take compensation for it.

In neither case is there any theft going on, nor is anyone getting a free ride.

I guess I also question the very premise of "free under condition X" is "free". Condition X is simply the payment. So you are getting Y for the price of X.

If you demand that Google charge for content then I do question how the very business model of search engine could work. Pretty much by definition if Google (or anyone else) has to pay to direct traffic to you then they are disincentivised to direct traffic to you. It's as if a store lost money on every sale, but made money if customers were present in the store.

If you think people are cynical now about Google wishing people clicking on promoted content (ads) then watch them race to the bottom where they (and Bing and everyone else) will only show promoted content.

Because here's really where your analogy breaks down: E.g. clicks on organic search results on Google brings money to the newspaper (via ads), but a news paper article author does not get paid per person reading their article. In other words: It may superficially be similar in actors and content creation, but all that matters in economics is incentives, and the incentives are completely different. And nobody will pay for a disincentive.

Which has been the case since search engines became a thing.