Google to stop showing news snippets for French users
reuters.com
reuters.com
nosnippetThey were!
From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en
<meta name="googlebot" content="..., ..." />
These meta tags control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing.
nosnippet - Don't show a text snippet or video preview from being shown in
the search results. For video, a static image will be shown instead, if
possible. Example: <meta name="robots" content="nosnippet">
max-snippet:[number] - Limit the text snippet length for this page to [number]
characters; specify 0 for no snippet or -1 to allow any snippet length.The end result is that the law meant to work against Google actually benefited them. News sites cannot afford to not give Google a free license, but smaller search engines face a big issue.
I highly expect it to pan out the same way again.
Did they read less news? Was that a problem?
Did they read other news?
Did they visit more smaller news sites as opposed to a few large ones?
As far as I know google is now the only search engine who has this free license.
It's quite funny because those publishers advertised the law with some heavy criticism towards google. The whole thing was some kind of "anti-google-law". In the end they made them stronger as other portals and search engines have not been granted a free license. I always wondered if this whole thing was not intended this way to give them a better standing on google news in the end.
The EU could have learned something here just like the lobby who pushed for it again.
I'd assume the result for those who do not use google to look for news will find smaller "news" sites. Especially those who feed them fake news because every serious news site has their license rights protected by the VG Wort.
A lose - lose for everybody.
Axel Springer had to revert because their traffic and revenues plummeted. With your logic it wouldn't even have affected them.
Maybe I am missing something, so please enlighten us.
It's like saying that Google doesn't benefit from GMail because people reading mail doesn't make them money.
I guess an other way to answer this question would be to say: if Google doesn't care at al about previews, why did they develop the feature in the first place and then fought against these laws instead of just removing it as soon as people started complaining? Clearly they do deem them valuable enough to go through this whole charade.
Let's say I blog about topics a lot of other people blog about. Let's say there was a Google Blogs. I would want Google to post a relevant snippet of my blog post to help me stand out from all the other links. And Google would happily comply, because this makes those who bought ads that now get displayed on my blog happy, and Google can charge them more money.
I'd say I would have to have a very twisted and self absorbed mindset to believe that Google is stealing from me for posting a relevant excerpt from my blog. But maybe that's just me.
This is true only insofar as it incentivizes people to come to Google in the first place. If Google can directly provide the information that the user is looking for, then it gains no benefit from sending the user elsewhere instead.
Second, in most cases those previews are too small to provide the information the user was looking for.
Your argument is based on false assumptions.
Given that there are no ads on Google News and Google makes money from most online ad sales, what reason would Google have to limit click throughs?
Clicking on am article gives Google more data and increases the chances that Google will make some money from ad sales.
Google definitely wants Google News to be the starting point for news reading habbits, but Google definitely also wants it's readers to click through and view news articles.
There are plenty of anti-competitive practices by Google to address. This simply is not one of them and arguably does more to shore up Google against competitors given that Google has a stronger ability to force publishers to grant Google access. Publishers already had full opt-out control over how Google uses their content and smaller aggregators were free to ignore those meta headers. Now smaller aggregators must convince publishers to opt-in or face legal consequences.
This law is just simply idiotic unless your only goal was to help Google News compete in Europe.
It does matter for this discussion because this is about Google showing two sentences of an article as preview. And the accusation is that Google somehow steals money from publishers by doing so. I don't like Google, but this accusation is just outright nonsense.
> The insane amount of money they extract won't benefit content creators and anyway it ending in the hands of a quasi-monopoly can't be in the public interest.
Ah, so it is a matter of principle to you. Taking away from the beast is a good thing. Off with it's head!
It nearly sounds like you think that no matter the means, it is always good to just hurtle laws at the quasi-monopoly.
That is a dangerous stance, tannhaeuser, because mindlessly throwing stupid laws at the beast might make it stronger, just like it does in this case. And the smaller competition might be crushed before it even existed. But, hey, at least you could take that fork and torch for a spin!
I'm all for cutting down Google, Facebook and Microsoft a couple of notches in favour of smaller competition, but I'm dead against using stupid or even dangerous means. This law was put into place by people who hate the internet, and they would set it all aflame if they could. Don't blindly follow destroyers.
There is a much deeper issue at hand here. The publishing industries make money off of information. Information has decisively different properties from physical objects. I have an apple. I give it to you, I don't have it anymore. You give it back, now you don't have the apple. I can hand out apples from my box and count how many I had, how many I have left. That gives me the exact amount of my apples out there. You can use these properties as the basis of a business model.
Information does not have the properties of physical objects. And therefore you shouldn't be able to use the same business model for selling apples for selling information. Yet throughout most of the 20th century exactly this was done. It was possible because the information was mostly stuck to the media it was sold on. It was hard to get the information off that medium and copy it to another without losing something. This made it possible to use physical object business models with information.
But that was all a fantasy. And this fantasy collapsed when the media moved to computers. For music, e.g., that was about 25 years ago. Half a century ago.
However, a huge chunk of the publishers and artists are still living in their fantasy. They don't see that they are deluding themselves when they demand their old business models to still work. For them, its the internet that is at fault, not their incomplete grasp of reality. And the big scapegoat is the internet.
If those publishers could, they would burn down the internet in a second and replace it with something they control in order to rise again as the oligopolies they once were. They yearn to remove the ability from small content creators to independently publish. They would like to build their old schemes like GEMA and VG-Wort into the internet. This is at the core of why these laws have been put into place. And that is why I believe my rhetoric is well placed.
If you look closely, you will see that those publishers and artist who moved on, beyond the fantasy, are not the ones endorsing these laws. Because they know that they are not under threat by the internet or by how Google shapes their Search site. The adversaries here are Facebook or Spotify, or the way Youtube is starting to cater towards big publishers over small content creators. But this is a different battle.
I believe that if we let the old publishers control the fight against oligopolies, we will just have the old ones back in the end, and the internet will be poorer for it. I have the feeling, the press has pulled people like you already to their side with their constant barrage of negativity on everything internet.
I don't want to discourage you from taking up arms, but please be more careful with whom you are standing on the barricades.
Google News presents an aggregated view of online news. Because of Google’s reach, news.google gets a lot of page views and results in a lot of click-throughs to the actual publisher. Facebook is a similar source of traffic although that’s driven by social sharing. In both cases, publishers benefit a lot assuming they can monetise those page views.
I’m not a big fan of Google but Google News isn’t the “bad guy” here.
I don’t follow: what is happening is exactly what the EU wants. I fail to understand the comment here entirely. Until all countries are executing this law this is exactly what the commission predicted is going to happen.
No, they wanted Google to pay licensing fees and all for showing snippets. That did not happen.
They never wanted Google to show displaying snippets, as we will shortly see when the French publishers notice the plummeting page views and issue "emergency snippet licenses" to Google in order to save themselves from their own greed.
Previous discussion on this had a link to the research paper that actually measured said "plummeting" in case of Spain - the decrease in traffic was well under 20%. Just FYI.
* Edited for clarity.
If a stock drops 10% in a day, that's gigantic. Considering how precarious the profitability of news organizations can be to begin with, a 10% drop that can't be reversed could be the difference between staying in business and folding, depending on how costs are structured.
If your traffic decreases by, say 10%, that's huge -- that's a plummet. (If your traffic decreases by 80%, you don't need adjectives anymore -- you're probably out of business now.)
I think EU is happy with the outcome.
And the publishers deserve it.
I also think it is fair that the tech giants starts to pay, and maybe we can find a more reasonable model later.
I'm saying publishers convinced EU that it was a good idea and now they got what they deserved instead of what they wanted.
It also feels right that Google should pay, but I want them to pay ordinary VAT / sales tax on ad sales instead of this.
that would make far more sense
> “The negotiations were difficult, but what counts in the end is that we have a fair and balanced result that is fit for a digital Europe,” said European Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip. “The freedoms and rights enjoyed by internet users today will be enhanced, our creators will be better remunerated for their work, and the internet economy will have clearer rules for operating and thriving.” The bill is expected to be formally approved by mid-April, after which European Union governments will have two years to include it in their national laws.
Take the claims one by one:
> The freedoms and rights enjoyed by internet users today will be enhanced
I'm not sure what freedom or right was enhanced. Maybe the rights of publishers not to have their content seen by users? But certainly the freedom and right of a news consumer in France was harmed as they have less access to news in a convenient fashion.
> our creators will be better remunerated for their work
This clearly didn't happen. Maybe people will click more, but Google is said to have performed experiments and found that not showing the text leads to a 45% decline in traffic to the website. Yes, they are likely bias and it might be a ruse, but considering how much internet giants focus on providing the least amount of friction and latency to users, I believe the sentiment is correct.
> and the internet economy will have clearer rules for operating and thriving
This is an odd claim because some smaller internet companies got exemptions and there was some horse trading with gas. Doesn't seem any clearer to assert publisher rights based on a case by case basis
> The deal was made possible after France and Germany proposed a compromise last week, giving smaller internet companies some exemptions from the rules. The compromise coincided with a separate deal in which France agreed to support Germany on a natural-gas pipeline with Russia, according to officials in Brussels and Berlin.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-union-agrees-to-new-co...
> Maybe the rights of publishers not to have their content seen by users?
Well, it was always their right (as they could use robots.txt) but now Google gives them a more fine grained control over it.
Though to be honest I'm very, very happy they're trowing a fit right now. Yes, please, use the panel and take your content off of Google.
> But certainly the freedom and right of a news consumer in France was harmed as they have less access to news in a convenient fashion.
True. But they can always go to the website of their favourite news org and go from there.
Does it? I am pretty sure Google already provided on page directives that gives sites full control of image indexing, snippet usage and even snippet length. [0]
The differences is that now all news sites are opted-out by default, a legal agreement is required to opt in, and the force of law ensures compliance.
I don't really see how this actually does ANYTHING to help anyone except lawyers. I guess it makes it harder for small aggregators to get going...but is that really a result we wanted?
Yeah I heard so also as well (your link might be missing some things though), though now they can do it through an UI?
> The differences is that now all news sites are opted-out by default, a legal agreement is required to opt in, and the force of law ensures compliance.
I don't think a legal agreement is required to get back in, or it might be a simple one. Of course if you let Google show it and forget about the others then you're just encroaching its position (but hey isn't that what everybody said it would happen? tough)
> I guess it makes it harder for small aggregators to get going...but is that really a result we wanted?
Yeah... I'm actually sad Google is not asking for money to show full results for them, it would have been funnier.
If people still use Google to find results but have to go on just title and publication to figure out what link to click which spoiler alert they already mostly do then you have 2 net effects.
Searching for news is slightly more cumbersome and resources that do allow snippets will get slightly more clicks from people who can read both.
Who wins in that context?
The purpose of this regulation is to protect the companies and journalists who actually assemble and write the news against a predatory business model.
The news companies can opt to give away their content to Google for free. The directive merely gave these companies more choice, by stopping illegal web scraping without asking first.
This was never about choice, which they've always had, this has always been about both having their cake and eating it to. When French publishers inevitably see their traffic plummet, they will almost certainly sue Google for it.
The point is that it is always opt-in, though. There is no such thing as "use it as you like unless the copyright holder opts-out" anywhere in copyright law. You cannot just e.g. use substantial portions of someone else's texts in your own publications[1], sample a part of someone else's music for your own song, use someone else's graphics as your own, use an unlicensed font, etc., without a written permission by the copyright holder.
The EU directive merely ensures that existing laws are enforced instead of being systematically violated by large corporations.
Independently, of course, you could ask whether copyright law should be that way. I personally don't think so, and think it should be changed in various ways that strongly disfavor large corporations, but that's a completely different discussion. What I try to explain here is the rationale of the EU commission, which primarily thinks in legal terms, not my personal views about that matter.
If you ask for my personal views, I do find it appalling that large companies like Google (and Uber, Microsoft, AirBnB, etc.) continue to try to circumvent laws in ways that no small companies could get through with in court, simply because they have the business power and enough lawyers to give it a try.
[1] beyond fair use, which is very limited and does not apply int his case.
> After the passage of the law Google asked German publishers to explicitly opt-in or be excluded from search results as protection against liability. Publishers opted-in but filed an antitrust complaint, arguing they were effectively forced by Google to waive their copyrights.
No, but snippets are considered fair use. At least, they were until Article 13 killed the concept.
You want to play a role in the game? Well, then do your bidding...
This benefits the newssite, not google.
Those few lines function as an advertisement for the actual article. Usually companies have to pay for advertisements...
Since Google makes money off of most online ad sales, it often directly benefits Google as well.
Google makes a significant portion of the value for each ad.
> For displaying ads with AdSense for content, publishers receive 68% of the revenue recognized by Google in connection with the service. For AdSense for search, publishers receive 51% of the revenue recognized by Google. [ 0]
But Google was not the worst affected, smaller news aggregators like Meneame suffered more because they didn't have the finnancial muscle to pay even if they wanted
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-google-news-effect-spain-r...
"Yet the report points out that 'substitution effect' is very small in comparison to the 'market expansion effect' that aggregators cause. According to the research, aggregation services reduce search times and allow readers to consume more news overall. The NERA analysis finds that in the first few months of 2015 after the introduction of the law, publishers saw traffic fall on average more than six percent, while smaller publications saw it drop by 14 percent drop."
You comment reads a bit like "the workers wanted a raise, now they're on strike and they get less money than previously, achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted to do!" It's technically true of course, but I think they hope that Google will suffer enough from this decision that they'll have to reconsider in the future. Alternatively, they hope that people will still want to get French news and will move to other websites which will accept to give money to the news organizations.
I'm really not sure that it's going to work on either count but on the other hand it's clear that many EU constituents (those who actually pay taxes and employ people in the EU) felt that something had to be done.
>the absolute contempt they had for young people saying they we're entitled children trained by internet giants to expect free things
I mean, if anything I agree with this statement, except I'd put "free" between quotes. The ad-driven business model is a cancer as far as I'm concerned.
Honestly, the entire institution gets what it deserves. I've never seen such an utter shambles of democracy as bad as the Article 13 one.
They're just trying to fix Google's mess, like when they have to litigate to collect taxes or when the DOJ litigates to prevent colluding to depress employee wages or when customers litigate to collect their refunds. It's Google forcing new laws and litigation, the EU is much their victim as their employees, customers and users.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/24/2025223/google-fran...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-af...
I say this without jest: At least the giant corporations can be held to account - I can choose not to use their services, or decide to use an adblocker. The EU can't and I can't opt out of it.
In matters such as these (and others, such as food, medicine, and transport safety), it makes more sense to have government regulation rather than relying solely on consumer pressure. Moreover, it is more efficient for businesses to have one consistent set of rules to follow, rather than a patchwork of 28 contradictory rules, and it is harder for large corporations to pressure countries if those countries are acting together as a bloc.
If you want to opt out of the EU, I'm sure there are several territories in the world that would welcome you to live there. Alternatively, you have EU protected free speech and voting rights to convince your fellow citizens that your country should end its EU membership. You just need to get enough of those citizens (and their elected representatives) to agree on what specific alternative to EU membership they want instead.
The reason nothing has been done is because the majority are uninformed or just don't care. I'd argue we still get the better end of the deal with free as in beer content.
> Moreover, it is more efficient for businesses to have one consistent set of rules to follow, rather than a patchwork of 28 contradictory rules, and it is harder for large corporations to pressure countries if those countries are acting together as a bloc.
What do you personally think is better? A huge institution with power to regulate the markets of 28 nations, or 28 independent nations?
It's not about money. I think it's too much power concentrated into a single body. Would you prefer a business-first approach for anything else?
> EU protected free speech
Not allowing parody and remix is also an attack on my free speech.
That is why EU wide regulations need to be considered with more considation for the needs of EU users and less consideration for the demands of private industry lobbyists.
None of which had anything to do with Google News and publisher demands.
Sometimes representative democracy has problems, sure; the usual generation gap between politicians and their constituencies is a big reason it takes so long for human-rights legislation (on e.g. gay marriage) to catch up with public sentiment.
But it’s still probably better than the alternatives, e.g. direct democracy. There are a lot of things you just can’t get done using direct democracy. Imagine a nation run by referendum trying to negotiate e.g. a distasteful-but-strategically-necessary wartime alliance with another nation. Sausage needs to get made; but who has the political capital to make it?
The EU isn't a democracy or even a representative democracy. Notice how lots of people wrote to their MEPs and nothing happened other than MEPs calling their voters stupid? That's because in the EU all decisions are ultimately made by the Commission. The Commission started this, the Commission made it happen and by treaty the Commission is the only body able to actually propose changes to the law.
The EU Parliament quite literally doesn't fit the dictionary definition of Parliament. There isn't any way voters can change this law by voting, not even if every party was for changing it, because even a majority of MEPs cannot change the law. But changing the law is the entire and sole purpose of politicians, so we can observe that MEPs aren't really politicians.
A group elects someone who’s better at statecraft than the group is
That has never been part of the idea of democracy. What makes you think politicians are so great at statecraft? There are no tests they have to pass, assuming you could even make such a test to begin with. What's the definition of statecraft, even?
There's no evidence politicians are smarter or better than the average voter. That's why anyone can turn up and get votes.
Or, from the people’s perspective: elected representatives engage in awful horse-trading and disrespect their constituency’s opinions, and yet gradually everything gets better “somehow.”
For a whole lot of people in the EU things are either stagnant or getting worse. Look at the dire economic performance of Italy since joining the Eurozone: was growing, since flat.
Things don't get better because people repeatedly elect politicians who are superior to themselves. Things, by and large, get better when governments shrink and stay out of things. The fate of the eastern bloc under Soviet rule and then capitalist democratic rule shows that in action (although, now they are at risk of going backwards thanks to things like Article 13).
There are a lot of things you just can’t get done using direct democracy.
Tell that to the Swiss. Most successful country on the continent, by far.
> ...
Thank you for pointing this out.
Edit: Why is the parent comment being downvoted? All of the facts presented are quite public knowledge.
> What's the definition of statecraft, even?
A member of the old boys club who graduated from Eton college seems to be the British definition.
Probably by people not reading it and having a kneejerk Brexit-related response.
The words I read were what I already believed to be true and indeed would've written myself - and if it wasn't true I'd want to know.
In practice, MEPs are told who to vote for by their advisors. Who had even heard of Ursula von der Leyen until she was voted in?
It's common for europhiles to describe this sort of process as democratic because the Council is made up of national leaders. Unfortunately there's a key detail that makes this step non-functional: Council meetings are held in secrecy. No minutes or voting records are published.
How was von der Leyen selected and why? Nobody knows outside of the national leaders themselves. And there are sadly good reasons to believe that they systematically lie to their populations about what happens in those meetings. For one, Juncker himself has complained about this: leaders support a policy in private at the Council level, then go back home and tell their populations they fought against it and are being forced to do it by the EU.
Given the staggering amount of mendaciousness and duplicity the current anti-Brexit Parliament has been revealing amongst the ruling classes, I have no doubt at all Juncker's complaint is valid. But of course if the EU wanted it could easily fix this: just make Council meetings public so people can see if their leader's acts in those meetings matches their acts back home.
The other problem is the number of levels of indirection. Politicians don't base campaigns on who they'll vote for as leader of the Commission. It's "democratic" only in tortured theory.
I think it's a question of how many steps removed the decision makers are from elected officials.
It's true that the EU Parliament doesn't quite work the way you want it to, however it does have the ability to "Censure" the EU Commission by a vote of no confidence:
If it did so, a new Commission President would then be nominated, which the EU Parliament could approve based on the nominee's support for a change to the law.
This would be a way of working around the fact that the EU Parliament does not formally possess legislative initiative, which you seem to think it is missing, despite the fact that the law in question was amended and approved by the parliament as part of the legislative process.
The Parliament doesn't get to choose the leader. They can only ratify or delay the decision of those who do. That makes them useless. Even if they fire the entire Commission, the Council will just immediately re-appoint a new President who has exactly the same views and policies.
This kind of "you may be a nuisance but not change anything" arrangement is everywhere in the EU's structure. It's infantilising. It says you can cry if you like and get some attention for a while, but ultimately, the decisions aren't being made by you.
Democracy is not a system to promote meritocracy. It's a system to avoid autocracy, and all other things are exernalities rising from this core purpose.
The point of democracy is to have a constant churn within a large enough powerpool to discourage formation of ruling cliques and oligarchies. It's nice if the chosen representatives are efficient and skillfull, but that's not the point of the system.
There are two other important problems with the system as well: voter turnout and voting in blocs (country or EU party). The reason this is a problem is that the candidates campaign as individuals, but act according to what their group tells them. Sometimes they vote along what their country votes, other times they vote along the lines off what their parliamentary group tells them. But where are the interests of the actual constituents here?
I wonder where those informed people got their information from.
Why do you think the EU constituents had anything to do with these laws? The laws were incentivised by the publishers. The crux in the EU is that the biggest part of the industry see the internet just as infrastructure and couldn't care less about net neutrality, censorship, equal access, or ad revenues. The only industries affected by those issues are tech companies and publishers.
The tech companies have a pro liberalisation stance while the publishers hate the internet's guts. Now guess where countries with strong and influential publishers and a nearly non existent tech industry are leaning to. That publications like Süddeutsche, Zeit, and FAZ have been portraying the internet as a bad and dangerous thing for decades now, doesn't help.
It's just a wee bit less popular than the centralized ad-fueled internet.
I'm not pitying the useless money grab ad-infested publications, but they were the ones that actually spent on good journalism.
Though it would be good to see a lot more numbers/data about this. Also probably with globalisation the market simply consolidates. There's no need for more than a handful big "trust anchors" for news. The local news problem is tougher to crack though :/
This is using law to grant the lobby of newspapers additional revenue. And blame Google for not abiding.
because they're using someone elses intellectual property in the process, and that's what this law is about. Sure, the relationship goes both ways in that it increases exposure for the newspaper, but there is a very principled case to be made that Google profits for free off the intellectual creations of third parties.
The one point I agree with in your question is "why only newspapers", I think we should systematically move towards monetisation when Google indexes, reuses and displays content from third parties and incorporates them in their products.
Also there is no genuine search competition anyway, so instead of waiting another 20 years I'd just be happy if Google starts paying people for the content that they use.
That would be a terrible business model though. Maybe the French newspapers should join together to create a search engine of their own content, if there really is a lot of money to be made in that game.
I think we need to pass legislation that prohibit exclusive content licensing and require that equivalent licensing terms are offered to all competitors (similar perhaps to rules about patent licensing when it is incorporated into a standard?)
Edit: Since Google has a near monopoly on ad networks, there is a sense in which Google already is the one paying for much of this content.
How exactly google will suffer? It seems to me that Google is the party that can afford to walk away and that the French news media cannot.
The whole concept France is pushing has been ludicrous all along. There's no revenue to share or for Google to lose. It's just a free service. Just free. No ads. No money.
The ads are on the search page. Not the news page.
Having data on online news reading habbits is a nice bonus, but the reason Google News exists is to boost ad sales to news sites.
Reconsider what? What is Google doing wrong here exactly?
Google loses literally nothing.
Google doesn't make any money off Google news. They make money sending traffic to advertisers, not to news sites. And the Google news page doesn't run ads. It's just a free service.
The only benefit to Google is that it makes their brand better.
This has been the irony all along; Google's been running a 100% free (NOT ad supported) service to help users find news sites, and the news sites demand to be compensated. So OF COURSE this is going to be the response; there was never any money to share.
Once they have your attention, then they can sell ads.
Google News is an attention winning product, and it feeds into their broader ad ecosystem even if they don’t monetize it today.
And the French law applies to all companies in Google's position, not just to Google. So the there's still nowhere better than Google for users to go.
The only losers in this deal are the French news agencies, and perhaps French users if you consider them worse off for not finding French news sources.
So French users go to French media sites. I'm not really seeing the big loser here beyond Google, which is exactly why they've fought this so hard and for so long (despite, by your take, making no money on it).
So Google gets to advance the dominance of AMP, gets to track user behavior and does make money from Google News. If it didn't really have any value to Google and advance their agenda, it would be shutdown.
https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-ad/#supported-a...
That's not true. The entire reason Google hosts these "snippets" on their search results page is to keep users on that page and not clicking through to other sites. With this they lose that ability.
You're talking as if Google News is the only affected site here. It isn't: the vast majority of this traffic is on search results pages. Which Google does make vast amounts of money from.
I don't think this is the case for search or news. The "snippets" under a search result make me more likely to click through and really don't ever provide enough info to allow me to skip reading the page.
Since your assertion runs counter to my (and others) experience, I hope you have some actual data to back this up? Perhaps a website that added a robots.txt to prevent snippet collection and saw an improvement in traffic from search?
This is a remarkably naive take.
If Google provides a service, they make money off it.
In 2008, during one of the many legal battles Google has waged over Google News, Google estimated that they made $100M off of people using Google to access news. Clearly that number would be some factor larger now. Because the more people who rely upon Google for a service, the less they end up elsewhere. The more Google controls your eyeballs and is likely to capture your ad clicks.
It's the same reason Google scrapes the web and provides the top answer in their answer bubble. It's "free" and it also robs viewers from ever going to the sites actually providing the information.
Or do you think Google puts all of that engineering effort, endless lobbying and legal fights with the news community...because they're just so benevolent?
Even ignoring the captured attention, this also enables Google to prioritize news sources that are more Google friendly (e.g. use Google ad networks), and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it.
If that's the case, then they must believe the snippets send more people to news websites than they otherwise would?
This is exactly the problem. X was something, therefore it had to be done, although it was utterly pointless.
This is everything that’s wrong with politics.
The politicians who were pushing this through were deliberately breaking just about every rule of civil political discourse. This is all on the record. Such behaviour it is completely out of line, but I don't know how to counter it effectively when those responsible for it have more political power and have better contacts in the media to have their views (and, in this case, lies) reported.
The news isn't an important business for google and it doesn't get its revenue from their.
In a strike, the employer has pressure to relent because workers have a thing the employer values.
But what does Google have at stake in this situation? Why on earth would they pay to link to news? Why are news links special?
Google believes it receives some sort of value out of their News service even if that value isn't directly in the form of advertising payments.
It’s an understandable move by google to a short-sighted law.
I’m VERY sympathetic to publishers - I work for them but this is a BS move
Really? Because only the Commission can propose laws and the Commission is not elected. Even MEPs get really low voter turnouts in many EU countries, because people feel that MEPs don't mean anything. I can understand it too, because MEPs seem to vote in blocs and what the people want seems to be entirely irrelevant.
Otoh Pinterest taking over Google Image search results with useless results is nothing short of malware.
Mostly other search engines seem to try to compete based on privacy or something, and while that's nice, it's not as tangible as superior core search functionality.
Like, DuckDuckGo isn't a bad search engine, and for a lot of things it seems about equally good. But "comparably good most of the time" doesn't make for a very compelling case to switch.
But you’re right, old european countries really never tried to think seriously about what makes them lagging so much behind the US and China.
Similarly, can Apple quite visibly switch map providers without much difference to customers?
As for news sources I suspect people are already very promiscuous, which is part of the problem.
[0]: https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en...
No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government, or of the concerns non-corporate-affiliated artists and content creators had about it screwing them over, or the bizarre voting fiasco.
> No mention of the fact that MEPs had very little to do with the contents of the law, which was mostly shaped by shady back-room dealings between the French and German government
Actually a lot of MEPs participated in the discussions and their contents (which doesn't mean what you're mention didn't happen, of course it did)
There are upsides, eg google news will stop being an option for news
They times have changed, and it seems going back is not an option. Before Google big publishers were the default for many people, either on paper or online. Now publishers are in the headline business. Also if they write good things, people will read it still.
They lost some/much of their network effect. And sure, we can say G is sucking up revenue, but they also make it possible to advertise for whatever keyword you want, much more effectively, than publishers did. In this sense G is just a better paper, truck, road, printing press and ad-sales-house in one. Pretty hard to beat it.
An aggregator is an option for getting news.
At least on the level of local newspapers in Germany it's a complete disaster for me personally. It's not even that I wouldn't want to pay people that go out and report on local happenings, it's just that I don't want to add another 10-20EUR subscription for the 1/2 articles I'd want to skim that's actually relevant content and not some made up outrage or simply agency content.
Or is it an entire field of people being lazy and wanting easy money that caused it to go down the drain?
There exist “journalists” that write clickbait and content that wastes time. There are also journalists that risk their life and limb to gather and disseminate important information for society.
Clearly, it’s a difficult problem to address. The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad. The journalists need a steady source of income to feed their families, and to incentivize people to become journalists. There’s a myriad of other issues as well, but it’s not a simple “the entire news media field is a bunch of bad actors”. They’re not paid well as it is, and I don’t see many people clamoring to take on the risks that real journalists do for the money they do it for, so there must be an issue on the revenue side as well.
> The public needs to be educated enough to differentiate good journalism from bad journalism, so that they reward the good journalism and not reward the bad.
This just sounds mightily smug to me. People like things that you don’t think they should like, but if only they were as educated as you are, they would share your correct tastes and world view?
It’s not about tastes. For example, in subjects requiring data analysis, I don’t see why the thoughts of someone who doesn’t understand math and statistics would be as valid as someone who does.
> Is it possible that a sufficient number of people aren’t willing to pay for information if it’s available for free with zero friction, and that is why journalism is having a tough time?
While the short answer might be yes, I'm not sure how to argue against that point without whataboutism. The world, and especially how it's people consume information, changed in the last few decades, I don't see these companies adopting, most of them seem to be fine with a senseless defence of a status quo they would never be able to build up today. Business models come and go, an industry as large as mainstream news media can't get their act together and figure out a model that people are willing to pay for. Instead they cripple innovation by lobbying for legislation like the one discussed in the article.
tl;dr: If news outlets let themselves get killed by the inevitable death of print media I just don't see how that's the people's or the internet's fault. They have enough collective resources to come up with an alternative.
I think it’s false to say “news outlets let themselves get killed”. If it’s that easy to say, then go ahead and put forth a business plan that can succeed even with people copy pasting your text to different websites for free consumption.
I think it would be worth to give the same way a try that effectively killed video and music piracy over the last decade. Content delivery across media, across devices, with less friction than it is now to visit some ad infested site or sign up for weird, non-obvious paywalls for each and every single outlet. Maybe give other players a chance, like Apple News or even the here mentioned Google News, and work with them instead of going down in their shadow. You'll always have piracy but if you give people convenience you can still turn a profit, especially on a website like HN copy&pasting articles wouldn't be a thing if people felt it was less ethical than just paying for a good service.
I don't want to suggest that it's easy or that I've got a business plan to save the news industry, I'm merely trying to express my frustration with how they currently handle it (but yes, I feel like at least part of that is self inflicted by the industry).
As for your first point, I'm sure journalists tried. We've even seen some nice initiatives in Germany where they tried to get people to sign up to purely journalist-driven services. Not sure what came out of that tbh. But that brings me back to the thing that my main grievance are not journalists, I honestly admire people that chose this profession, especially those who don't end up rewriting press releases or clickbait headlines for some blog to make a living.
I've also been thinking about this, with all the paywalls I've been running into. I don't mind paying for quality news, but I'd prefer to pay one entity for a certain article/month limit for all (or at least most) paywalled news sources. The one entity could distribute my subscription money to the news providers pro rata, according to my consumption.
The current system of paying for one news source doesn't work for me, because I want to read articles from all over. I don't consume enough from one source to justify the subscription cost.
> for all (or at least most) paywalled news sources
They only work where they work.
The only way I can ever see it happening is with an IETF standard that browsers pick up (perhaps using it as an opportunity to be the one entity you pay, and collect a fee) gradually convincing publishers to support this modern web standard.
The first problem is that they seem to have decided based on my IP that I only want to read news in the Dutch language. No setting to change that. They also seem to act as a portal that I need to go through to read the articles that they are suggesting to me.
There's a search function (only in the app, not on the website), but I'm not sure which news sources it searches. I can find articles from a big Flemish newspaper, but not the ones currently on that newspaper's homepage.
Paying for Blendle also doesn't seem to help me to get past the paywalls of bloomberg or the new york times.
Arguably the very fact that Google finds it worth to display content on the search result proves the contents value. Why show it if it’s worthless ?
I agree on the pricing of subscription, but it doesn’t justify Google acting as a middleman.
Why do you think it is?
Well done!
Only on the big websites though, why would a news org bother with small or tiny news aggregators?
The small websites will have to shut down while google will get even stronger. (This happened in germany already when they introduced a very similar law)
That's why every single person who knows what they are talking about has warned about this law from the beginning, but they were all ignored. Now this deals incredible damage to the future of EU internet companies and helps established big US corps. Everyone knew that, its just business as usual with the corrupt to the core and incompetent EU.
A much better law would have standardized a set of headers or meta tags, similar to what Google uses, to allow publishers to specify allowed usage and created penalties for aggregators that don't respect those headers.
In what way do you envision this helping smaller sites?
The reality of the situation is this: there is a lot of money in advertising. Google is sucking all of this ... and recently even more than ever. Google should go back to being the gatekeeper that gives a lifeline to content sites. Honestly , i think it's stupid for google to be trying to make itself a content site, it's a self-destructive strategy. It's sad that it has to be done with legal action.
The one providing the content has rights to his content.
Because that actually hurts the original source. Google providing the first 2 sentences with a link to the article? Not so much.
As the Springer case has shown, Google is actually providing a service to the publishers here, who receive considerable less traffic without Google sending users their way.
Lobbyists for magazines and newspapers got the EU to put this law into effect and I'm glad they're going to be the ones who suffer the worst. If your news story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the two lines Google shows, you don't have anything of value to protect.
> If your news story is so short it can be explained in a thumbnail and the two lines Google shows, you don't have anything of value to protect.
Major scoops that require many man-months of digging can often be summarized in just a headline.
If that was the case and if it was a real problem, newspapers and magazines wouldn't want to be displayed at news agents either.
It may be an unpopular opinion, but Google was stealing. They were showing enough information no one was clicking the links. What this means for content creators is that you couldn’t make revenue.
If I search for something on Google I get so much information above the fold (and ads), I pretty much never see a real site. That’s a serious issue, because Google isn’t creating that content. Worse, their using their monopoly to push the AMP framework to make it easier to get snippets and actually serve your content on their servers.
No, this doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Almost all decent sized websites add their own preview and snippets (which Google can display). So all it does is enable further controls to publishers.
Were they? From the data I found for a very similar law in Germany the opposite seems to be true.
Axel Springer AG (biggest publisher, also primary lobbyist for the law) gave Google a free license two weeks after Google removed the snippets for all their sites. They noted a 40% drop in clicks coming from Google and an 80% drop from Google News. With estimates from statistics collectors putting users coming from Google anywhere between 15% and 35% (depending on the individual site) that's a massive reduction in users and ad revenue.
I don’t know the specifics though and there was no link provided. However, in any case I think my point remains - assuming that’s true, why was it the case?
Publishers have always been able to control their appearance in Google and Google News, using robots.txt and meta tags. If they thought Google was 'stealing' they could prevent it by just ... asking them not to.
They (Axel Springer and other EU publishers) didn't do this, because they make a lot of money out of Google sending them traffic which they can then monetise by running ads on the resulting page loads, ads that Google will also help provide if they want, but doesn't insist on. Instead they quite happily let Google index and send them traffic completely gratis.
At some point some newspaper barons noticed that the EU was very much in hock to them because it relied for its own ideological and political goals on lots of positive press coverage and more importantly, no digging for dirt. Also the only tech firms that existed were all foreign and publishers are bleeding money, so, they decided there should be a "new deal" in which Google not only paid lots of money to index their website and serve a Google News index (in return for nothing), but should also pay them for the privilege! And because this made absolutely no sense for Google at all, they decided the only way to make Google do it was to enforce that Google News couldn't exist in Europe without these huge payments.
Google said that they weren't going to pay firms for the privilege of linking to them and if they weren't happy they were welcome to take themselves out of Google using robots.txt. So the battlefield was laid out.
First was Germany. The publishers bet Google would pay them rather than lose Google News. Google called their bluff and refused, with the result that the publishers caved and basically voided the law they'd lobbied to pass by granting Google a free license.
Next up was Spain. Spanish publishers looked at what happened in Germany and decided the problem was that the German publishers had been able to chicken out. Because the sort of news sites that get a lot of traffic from Google are largely interchangeable there was a prisoners dilemma in which whichever publisher folded first would take all the traffic and earn lots more money than their competitors. So in the Spanish law, publishers weren't allowed to give Google a free license.
The result was Google shut down Google News in Spain entirely. Also local competitors to Google News shut down too because the prices were calibrated to suck money out of a rich tech giant and small firms couldn't pay. Once again, Google called their bluff but this time, nobody won, the Spanish people just lost everything.
France and Germany looked at this and decided the problem was that individual countries were too small. If the same thing was done at the EU level then this time surely Google would be defeated and give them a free firehose of money, as they so desired.
Fortunately for them the EU Commission long since gave up on its people ever creating a tech firm, and the EU is very pliant to the wishes of German publishers. Note how Juncker and other top EU functionaries always write their op-eds in German newspapers. So the Commission was quite keen. Popular outcry doesn't matter because the EU is not democratic, it just resulted in this amazing response from the Commission:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190215/18005841607/eu-co...
So now the EU has passed the same law and round three begins. Will Google give in and pay the publishers lots of money? Or will it just shut down Google News in all of Europe?
So far we seem to be in the middle of this engagement, with France losing snippets. Maybe other countries will soon too. In the end Google News may vanish entirely in the EU. I am very skeptical Google will pay because after all, once the principle has been established that they'll pay to link to content, where does it end? That's all the company does: they could open themselves to arbitrary payments to anyone, anywhere, until they have no profit left at all.
Google can and could always link to the website. What they were doing was a bit more than that. Google is now trying to strong arm them to let them pull data from their sites. Literally, everything you describe above is what occurs when someone has a monopoly.
The quick answer area has a different set of issues and I think there is a stronger argument to be made for it reducing click through rates (though I always click through when the quick answers my question to verify there isn't additional relevant context that is not included.)
Publishers already had the ability to block Google's indexing, image indexing, news indexing and snippet creation and even snippet length using meta headers.
It is unclear to me how this actually gives publishers any more control over how Google uses their content. It seems to have much larger impacts on smaller aggregators. It does put legal weight behind that control, but it seems to me that a much better law would have standardized these meta-headers and put the force of law behind them, perhaps creating a header that notifies crawlers that they must have a license to display snippets of text over a certain length from a site. As it is, is there any way for a publisher to automatically grant all agregators rights to display snippets of their content or does the law forcibly opt all publishers into content restrictions?
Regardless, Google allows you to request links but no snippets for your content, again, it's all possible with pre-existing protocols and standards.
Really, Google is trying to strong-arm nobody. I don't see how anyone could conclude that. Google offer publishers a range of reasonable options from full cooperation to partial indexing to non-inclusion, always has, and those publishers have repeatedly refused to take advantage of any of these features.
What they want isn't control over linking or snippeting. That is obvious. What they want is the status quo, plus lots of money.
Anyone can set a robot.txt to nosnippet and there ya go, no snippet.
Now, did this law/regulation/policy-change help with that?
No, because there are still and probably will always be other news sites that enable the snippet preview feature. So Google is not incentivized to spend more on news snippets. (Ignoring whether they otherwise would, since they likely don't make money on them anyway.)
If you see the information as property of someone then this is problematic, but it’s no different from a subscriber of the newspaper telling his colleagues about a big story he read. Just at a larger scale.
This is a testable claim. If snippets were preventing people from clicking the links, then publisher revenue should rise now that Google isn't showing any information.
Now, keep in mind that every single time this experiment has been tried in Europe in the past, publisher revenues plummeted. But maybe this time will be different.
Those companies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to sue google... instead of spending trivial amount of engineering time to just put the right tag on their page.
So I don’t think “Google was stealing” argument holds water - if this was really the problem, then the solution does not make sense.
Fair use doesn't have a legal standing in the EU right now.
This whole concept of a small sample of something violating copyright IMHO is the death of culture, it's excessively injecting chilling effects and barriers into information sharing. We went through this in the 80s with Hip-Hop artists and sampling.
I mean, if my son quotes a paragraph out of a French news website for a term paper, and that paper is published online, is it now a copyright violation? When does text summarization down to 2-3 sentences violate copyright? How far do we take this?
The publishers business models are collapsing, but their foray into hyper monetization and litigiousness surrounding any use of what they publish, if anything, will only serve to speed up they're demise.
We have to find alternate models to support local journalism, and this ain't gonna help.
What feels to me as hypocrisy is when US citizens accuse Europe of targeting this big US corporations with some laws where similar laws were pushed before by US, So is illegal for me to make a video clip with scenes from different movies but it should be legal for a big US company to compile snippets of text and images and put them on their page.
In my experience it happened to find the answer in that snippet and not visit the website and in other case the smaller snippet you see under the results was not to be found on the web-page that was linked
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at.
The european newspaper companys remind me of of music companys in the 90,s , they were facing declining sales of cds, , music piracy, they launched apps or various mediocre incompatible music service,s with drm some of which only worked on phone,s or pc,s or various devices, and used various , It required steve jobs to appear and apple to invent the ipod and itunes , a simple service ,buy music, buy albums, ,1 song for 99 cents ,all music in mp3 format. Then streaming came along and the music industry is actually making more money every year as people get used to paying subscriptions for apple music, spotify etc The News industry needs a tech genius to come along who knows how the web works , what users want, what they will pay for , Maybe have a website, New,s .fr, news,germany.com, news,spain.com etc Where any news paper or blog can post links to news storys or any article. WIth ads if they want , Any news paper with a website can post on the website, it would be run by a semi independent board, so its not under the control of just one company .
I'm guessing some publishers will give permissions and eventually forcing others to follow suit when they start losing traffic.
I would almost go as far as to say that this is a good thing for France.
I applaud the EU for at least attempting to grapple with the potential existential threat that Google represents, rather than rolling over and pretending nothing is wrong as the US does; or censoring, as China does. Even though I think the specific solution is probably unhelpful, it's much better than pretending that everything is as it should be, and crowing when newspapers get their "comeuppance" when Google punishes them by reducing their traffic.
Not sure what Google being an American company has to do with that.