Google, however, playing the hurt and wounded entity because they're no more able to leech "free" content to make a killing is, well, not very plausible.
Don't want to provide EU users with Google News?
Well, good bye and good riddance.
Google News doesn't (in itself) have revenue. No ads.
If you'd said Google Search or Youtube, then that's a completely different thing. Those are multi-billion dollar products, and I suppose your argument is that Google doesn't add any value between site/youtuber and customer?
But Google News? It's one thing to have a service for free. It's another to force someone to pay to run a free service.
"Playing the hurt"? I have seen zero indication of that. All I've seen is "Shrug, if that's the rules you make then a product like this cannot exist. We'll shut it, then".
I don't use Google News, myself.
> Well, good bye and good riddance.
People who like this kind of product (that now cannot exist) and news sites, would disagree. E.g. see what happened in Germany when the link tax was introduced.
You may not like it, but users (clearly… I mean they used it) and news sites do.
And now it's a thing that can't exist in the EU.
It's just plain greed, and I'd rather have Google shut down their news service instead of getting some unholy exemption which would stiffle innovation in the news gathering area.
But then, from the point of view of the news outlets, the benefits from this arrangement are not split fairly because they're the ones who do the hard and expensive part (writing the articles, investigating etc...) while Google merely links to them while making money from ads and collecting user data. If they're lucky the user may end up clicking on the headline to actually access the website, and then if they don't have an ad blocker they may generate a couple of ad impressions. Basically they're left with the scraps even though they're the one who actually did most of the actual work.
Now I think the link tax is a bad solution to this issue but I also think it's not completely fair to call news agencies "greedy" in a blanket statement. The business model of journalism in the internet era is still very much an open question.
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.
In particular I'm sure Google benefits from news indirectly by giving them valuable info about their users (you can tell a lot about somebody by what news they're interested in) and also by adding one more potentially useful service to the Google "suite", giving one more reason for users to commit to their ecosystems. That being said I'm incapable of judging of the actual monetary value of either of these things.
>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.
That's a bit of mental gymnastics here. That's like saying "people pay to have google ads, but you can also get listed in the organic results for free! Thanks Google!". If I go to Google news then I expect to see news, them only displaying newspapers that agree to pay for it would make the service objectively worse. That would be like having Google search only listing ads and no organic results.
As rational actors it's in the newspaper's best interest to create content that interests people and it's in Google's best interest to promote that content to make their service valuable. Nobody is giving anybody a freebie here.
But given that we are in 2018, not right after 2001-09-11 as when it was created, even if Google News doesn't add anything positive to Google's bottom line or PR (big, BIG "if") there's a huge cost to shutting it down to Google PR, since it's another example of Google shutting a popular product.
If the EU is doing this, it actually gives Google an excuse, in case they wanted to shut it down anyway. And nobody else would make a replacement because it's just not economical.
Yes. I agree that "being logged in while browsing the Internet" has value to Google.
You may disagree on what that value is. I may be way off, but it's a Fermi estimate. I encourage you to plug in the numbers you would estimate, and see what monetary value Google News has to Google, and see if a link tax with amounts that news sites would actually care about makes economic sense.
> That's a bit of mental gymnastics here.
I agree. It's more a counter-point to "obviously Google should pay" than a suggestion for a better model.
> Nobody is giving anybody a freebie here.
On this we agree. Both supply-side parties add value, and all three parties gain value. To say that one of the parties is a "leech" is not accurate.
If the EU forces Google to pay a meaningful fee to news sites, then that may (in my estimate: extremely likely to) completely erase any benefits, and it'd be rational for Google to bug out.
I'm pretty sure they use News as part of their tracking efforts. Being an extremely tight lipped and secretive company this point would be extremely hard to prove.
But given their history of shutting down unprofitable properties I would be surprised if they just provide this service for altruistic reasons.
Google News was ostensibly started for altruistic reasons, because on 2001-09-11 ALL news websites went down under the load.
In 2018 news websites maybe are more behind cloudflare/akamai and would be able to handle load, so less relevant technically.
But to say that altruistic reason would surprise you because of this history is extremely cynical. Even by my standards.
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.
>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.
I think that the main reason I object to the word "greed" is because it's no secret that most news organizations are struggling to stay afloat these days, so can you really call somebody "greedy" when it's potentially a matter of life or death? Saying that they're doing it in bad faith or that they're barking at the wrong tree would sit better with me I think.
I'm much more worried about aggregators acting in the EU and having no eternal fountain of revenue like Adsense to withdraw back to.
Now that the regulation would finally be there, a giant swarm of rent seeking publishers will move on to these local players in order to extract at least some revenue from someone, potentially killing a whole industry.
I'm running an aggregator and just the administration effort and legal exposure of being forced to make a deal with every single "content owner" out there (for giving them free traffic in the first place) would make me consider to shut down completely in the EU.
Keep in mind that Google News doesn't show ads.
We had quite a few experiments through out the history where central entity could decide what's best for citizens. Those did not end well.
So how about, if you don't like Google News, just don't use it. You don't need any EU regulation for that.
The "just don't use it" doesn't cut it. I don't use Facebook (or any of their products). It still very much affects - and has a direct impact on my life.
Edit : Added paragraph 2
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 like security mindset where if something is possible to know about you, you assume that somebody knows it. E.g. you can tell a lot by exact times of HN comments. Or by collecting and analysing data from multiple sources.
I don't like that thanks to street cameras or GPS your car can be very accurately tracked, but in my mind we kind of allowed that the moment we put visible unique registration numbers of cars (I know I'm pretty much alone on this one).
I have no idea where you got antisemitism from, but described problems seem to be mostly problems with society and not really specific to this medium. Some problems are difficult. What one considers a hate speech, somebody else can consider a freedom of speech. And vice versa.
Does it matter if it's Facebook or Orkut or VKontakte? Remember that just as you have some opinion about what policies should given company apply there are other people who have some strong opinion about completely different policies that should have been in place.
Personally, I don't care much whether FB allows pictures of breastfeeding mothers or not since I'm not a user. I also wouldn't even know whether it does - I don't like FB, so I ignore it and most news related to it.
Seems I hit home and somebody really, really doesn't like my reasoning and at least I hope to have made them uncomfortable with my arguments (best case I would have made them think, but I doubt it).
In the end: It's shame on them. In an apparently smart community clearly stated and honest opinions should never be downvoted, but I don't really see how it can be avoided. But in the end it's auto corrective anyway.
Thanks for the heads-up and the encouragement.
[1] https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9397...
Many of these news services do not have the audience, they are getting it from Google. It is nonsensical, that you would bring the eyeballs, and have to pay for the privilege. Google should them deny any promotion or traffic, let them stand on their own feet.
I don't understand. Where are they supposed to be getting the audience from? Do you consider clicks from Google to be worthless? Are clicks from Facebook any better?
In the eshop part of the web, there are price aggregators and the eshops pay them for the traffic they are getting, i.e. exactly opposite as the news publishers demand. It would be nonsense, if the eshops demanded that the aggregators pay them, because they make use of data of their sortiment or whatever. Even Amazon pays for the referrals, it is not being paid by the referrals for the privilege of being one.
It was always that he, who brings the customers, is getting paid for that. Not vice-versa.
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.
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.
What there is: a restriction on quoting from the article.
That will hurt automated aggregators, certainly. But not hand-curated sites or blogs.
Well, that depends on what is meant by "quoting from the article". The EFF believes that the proposed wording is so vague that some bare URLs might be covered:
> The Directive is extremely vague on what defines a "link" or a "news story" and implies that an "excerpt" consists of more than one single word from a news-story (many URLs contain more than a single word from the headline).
Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/eus-link-tax-will-kill...
I use it all the time and would miss it. I have no desire for the EU to regulate useful, free, non profit services out of my life.
What there is: a restriction on quoting from the article.