France rules Google must pay news firms for content
reuters.com
reuters.com
The arguments are:
- Press freedom is a fundamental right
- The press is not in its best state right now in France, so hitting them (for example, removing them from the search result from Google, which is in a monopoly position) is dangerous for the press freedom
- Google did not try to negotiate a fair price for the news, with the publisher
- Google applying a "zero price" for newspaper is not reasonable, as google has an economic incentive (users using its search engine) to display the news paper content in its search engine and in google news
- Google is in a monopoly decision, as most of the traffic of the newspapers comes from Google
- Google is discriminatory as it applies to newspapers equal treatments, even if they are in different situations (newspaper with protected content, and newspaper without protected content)
- Google tries to bypass the spirit of the law, which is for newspapers to get paid for their content by people using their content, and Google can do so because it's in a monopoly position in search
- Google does not has objectives explanations regarding its behavior besides « we don't pay for content », but paid for content in the past (for example, the french agency AFP)
The decision is manyfold:
- Google has to enter negociations, in a fair manner (I think this means no « we will not pay anything » unless they can back it off);
- The price decided by the negociations will be applied retroactively, from the date the new law was passed
- They have to report to the authority every three months the progress they make on this
- Restore the service they provided to newspapers to what was in place before the new law was voted
Let's note the court making this decision can not decide what the law is, and applies it as it was voted; even if it thinks some part of the law sucks, they cannot change it, it's not their role in the justice system.
This would appear to be the opposite of what "discriminatory" means.
(1) It would still be disturbing if the meaning of "discrimination" in French legalese was the exact opposite of its meaning everywhere else including vernacular French. War is peace.
(2) I have a sneaking suspicion that the meaning of "discrimination" in French law is sometimes this and sometimes the ordinary meaning, and if that's true it's a much worse state of affairs than just the legal meaning being opposed to the ordinary meaning.
Because parsing this sentence threw me for a loop, I'll note that I think you mean "you're insisting that, in order to be non-discriminatory, discrimination is required" rather than "you're insisting that there is a requirement imposed on discrimination, to wit, that it must be non-discriminatory".
I'm enjoying the schadenfreud even though I'm terrified of the implications for the rest of tech.
Is that what you are saying?
I don't understand. Google would display titles but not content on their news site, users would have to click through to the actual news website to read the story, and thus the news site would make money off those clicks. You could thus argue that Google was paying for the titles by directing users /clicks to the site?
Google News only shows brief abstracts from each article, and drives traffic to the publications' own sites. It's free advertising! How is this at all BAD for the publications?
As google is in a monopoly position, they can not refuse to display them (without even having tried to find a fair price) as it would hurt press (and, doing so, press freedom, which is a fundamental right in france).
You may think it's dumb, you may think it's not, I'm not debating this, I'm just stating what is the position of the lawmaker and the court.
But the French government wants Google to pay regardless of whether Google wants to display the content or not. Which is clearly offensive to natural justice, even if you don't like Google.
Press freedom is fundamental. Monopoly must pay for press because they must show it. We demand they show it for press freedom.
And press has an incentive to pay for being propagated in search results. As both sides gain in this exchange even without monetary transaction, there is no obvious way to see who should pay whom and zero price (in both sides) is a reasonable position.
It is true that Google being in a monopoly position makes it hard to establish price for 'being announced in search results'.
In truth paying for journalism going forward is going to be a difficult problem made more difficult by the fact that most of the money spent on journalism does not go directly to people who produce value like editors, analysts, photographers, journalists but instead goes to buildings and busines people.
If it’s not providing the service, it’s no longer a monopoly.
Assuming this will survive European appeal, which I don’t, one could yank all resources and cap e.g. bandwidth to Google News France. The aim isn’t to cripple the product. It’s to limit costs on a statutorily lossmaking product.
So, yes, indeed, Google can stop providing search for the whole France.
It should be able to just de-list news sources for French searchers. Again, I can’t see this surviving a non-French EU court. If it did, zeroing resources to crawling French news sites would be a reasonable response.
All that said, this is a silly way to go about subsidising local news. If France wants its newspapers, subsidise them. Don’t force an American company to provide you with a service and then make them pay for it.
It's already done, let's note.
Except it's not. I never use Google, I use DuckDuckGo. If DDG fails I try Bing. I have google and facebook domains blocked from access in my system because I don't like their tracking. Lots of other people search without Google. Google is simply not a monopoly in the search game.
And the fact that you can use another search engine doesn't change the power Google has, because everyone else uses Google. So your website has to play by Google's rules if you want to be found.
The fact is, despite some politicians declaring it a fundamental right, the news does not provide enough value to most people for them to pay for it.
There is an absolute glut of content out there, way way more than anybody wants or needs. Much of it is less than worthless, it's actually of negative value because it's designed to hijack your attention. Remove the infusion of ad money that is producing this, let it settle to the things that people are actually willing to pay for, and we'll all be better off.
If i pay for a news site, i would go directly to it, and i would not care about hundreds of other paywalled results that i would not pay for.
Google did remove the snippets, which hurt the news sites traffic, such is mostly Google referrals. This ruling makes it so they must index and pay.
I can’t imagine them forcing Google to list them but also pay them. Let’s see how organic traffic works for them.
I don't know what this post refers to, haven't had time to check yet.
They have demanded Google negotiate a fair price for the ability to display the news snippets.
That is not really obvious
Consired situation where Google is not a monopoly and there is active market with search engines and each search engine needs to establish contract with each news site.
Now consider case where one search engine that already has contracts with half of all news sites is negotiating a contract with a news site that already has contracts with half search engines.
Who gains more from such contract? I would guess that the news site, becase such contract would directly lead to higher ad revenue, while for search engine it would lead to better search results that may or may not lead to higher ad revenue, but the effect would be most likely sublinear.
Therefore, marginal utility of contract is higher for news site and it is possible that in negotiation search engine could got payments from it.
No it wasn't, Google News is still not available in Spain.
So yeah, I want Google to be able to say "I don't want to list papers that won't do this for free", yes.
That's up to the french people to decide. Google negotiating with nations as if it was a trade agreement between equals would mean we're living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
And I'm pretty sure the French people don't get to decide what I want. Only I get to decide that.
Great. You don't get to decide what the French people want either.
For another, it seems clear that one of the key lessons of the 21st century is that democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's essentially government by the majority of a population that's almost evenly distributed on the IQ bell curve. In a stark contrast to the membership of the National Assembly, those on the left side of the intelligence distribution can be brought to consensus far more easily than those on the right.
With their history, France should understand that better than most other countries. The input of their government, democratic or otherwise, should not be a factor in Google's decisionmaking process.
There is ample justification. They are dealing with french citizens on french soil. Google could have chosen to block all of France instead, thereby losing all the revenue it derives from the french people. It didn't.
If the French government has a beef with anyone, it's with their own people, who stubbornly refuse to use Videotex or whatever the homegrown French alternative is these days.
You don't want to go down this path, believe me. It will destroy the Internet in mind, body, and spirit.
Same logic applies to things like ad blocking. Publishers send me their content free of charge and then complain when I refuse to "pay" by looking at the noise. They should have returned HTTP 402 Payment Required instead.
Google News doesn't come looking for you, you have to go looking for it. Analogies to unsolicited advertising are not applicable.
This isn't a gang war for turf, France does not "have a beef" with Google. They have made laws for their country, and are enforcing those laws. Google has the freedom to comply or GTFO, simple as that.
Something, something, something, once you pay them the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane...
This has already happened, thanks in no small part to Google, Facebook, Cloudflare, and a few other large players. Centralization killed the libertarian dream of the internet as the great equalizing force. Instead the internet is just a massive rich-get-richer surveillance panopticon.
Well, that is nothing new. The idea that major threat to freedom in modern states is not from detached power elite but from the society itself is a major theme of "On Liberty" from J. S. Mill.
You seem to think it is a priviledge to be listed on google, I disagree, it is a priviledge for google to be allowed to conduct business, one that comes with a long list of conditions including fair business practice,paying taxes, hiring fairly,etc...
I would guess that a news site makes more out of having an article listed than Google does from listing the article. It seems a bit unreasonable to make Google also pay. Why not have the news site pay to be listed? They're making money from it, too...
I don't know who makes more money out of the relationship, that is not the problem here. Even if news sites make more moneyz they did not sign a contract with Google accepting this financial relationship. If google treats any sites in a special way to increase their own popularity or brand value, even if that site is already benefiting from the relationship Google must either get all the sites consent or negotiate payment.
If a person goes to a news site, the news site makes more moneu but that's a big if. The special treatment means people will glance at headlines and outlines extracted from the news sites and only click on a few sites. This special treatment means less ad clicks for news sites as compared to normal google listings
No, and it also didn't sign a contract with Google where Google accepted responsibility to promote access to the news site's pages, either.
So, in the absence of a contract, what determines the way that the relationship between them should be? robots.txt, that's what. If French news sites want to be on the web but not indexed, that's the existing mechanism to control how Google handles the content.
But demanding a contract so that Google can legitimately benefit, but not demanding one so that the news site can legitimately benefit, seems rather one-sided to me.
If google just listed twitter results that would fill the information void immediately.
If alt publishers were promoted maybe more opinions would be exposed.
The basis of commerse is the ability to contract with another party to act in such a way as to create mutual benefit. The fact that someone derives benefit from your actions does not create an obligation unless you have the ability to do otherwise.
This is an attempt to create in law an obligation for a private company to provide a benefit to another private entity for nonsensical justification.
If a few students can create Google a few Frenchmen can create a competitor. They just cannot necessarily convince most to use it.
Such a corporation probably wouldn't pay French news sites either nor would there be any incentive to charge them for it without a pile of other nations money on the line.
Hmm, sorry, this makes no sense - in this context the only possible advertisers are the news companies themselves (this is how you add your Ad to Google) and they want to be paid for this listing, not the other way around. Can you explain more how does Google derive value from these news articles?
Google news is part of the google user experience, that will retains users in time and agregate a detailed profil of the user.
That detail profile include the news search habit.
It does not sound very popular here but I see the leech as being the search engine here, not the company actually producing the content in naturals language and dispatching journalists to work on it.
i mean, sometimes, i don't even leave the search result page because i get my answer right there. heck, i don't even leave my address bar nowadays when using chrome!
news publications seems to be struggling and if google needs to support them then why not give them a little of the ads money?
Those news agency are actually putting natural language together and conducting journalist work.
Until google can auto-generate NYT/Guardian/Le monde/El pays... The leech is google; not the news.
https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/fr/communiques-de-pre...
This techcrunch post has more details than Reuters:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/frances-competition-watchd...
Abusive practices the agency says it suspects Google of at this stage of its investigation are:
The imposition of unfair trading conditions; circumvention of the law; and discrimination (i.e. because of its unilateral policy of zero renumeration for all publishers)
Umm ianal but isn't saying all publishers don't get paid the opposite of discrimination?
If they said some American companies get paid but not french etc I would totally get it.
A way of seeing this is that it might be fine for the big players for national and international news (Le monde, Le figaro ...) , but probably has a much bigger impact on small news outlet, because if they dont agree they are at a disadvatage obviously, so they cannot afford to say no, but at the same time they might already be in a difficult financial position, and that revenu might have helped.
The key part is that google had no real justification according to the court to treat everyone the same way, and that consitutes discrimination.
It seems a bit weird to me too but you could make a parallel to a school that has a set meal price for every student, regardless of parent income.This would obviously be discriminating towards the poorer students.
Now whether google is a public service the way school lunches are is up for debate but i think it basically comes down to equality vs equity
And my suspicion is that the value to Google is likely inversely proportional to the size of the news source, and I think the smaller publishers are hurting the most. I care to some degree that the NYT shows up in Google (but not much, really) whereas I couldn't care in the least about whether a local news paper in West Virginia is indexed.
I'm not clear on the legal details but this confused me. I would have supposed under most sane legal systems that there's no "trading conditions" that are relevant here, because there is (or ought to be) no trade. In most jurisdictions, you can crawl a website and present small snippets of its content under fair use to the public, without having to have any kind of agreement with the publisher.
If that's the case in France, then I don't see how Google is "trading" with these publishers at all. Is this not the case in France?
There are organizations with working business models like the German public stations[1] (ARD, ZDF, DW, arte and others), which are publicly funded and thus prepared for the future. These are even trying to innovate, e.g. by providing textual content for the web or by trying for years to create a single unified Netflix competitor for their video content, but they are being shut down with lawsuits from companies like Bertelsmann, too (in a similiar fashion like the story about the public weather data, recently here on HN).
I think at this point these companies have to wake up and realize that their old model is lost. I see four options for them:
1) Get in line and try to find shelter within those publicly funded systems. Use your lobbying budget to accomplish that.
2) Be the best. Find a niche. There will always be room for a few remaining.
3) Team up and create your own system.
4) Die. But don't slow everyone down endlessly trying to rent seek based on the working competition or the threats form US companies.
In the end, I don't see Europe losing anything to the US here, but instead the publicly funded organizations surving. When I look at an other market providing a human right, namely healtcare, I don't see Europe being worse off in the end at all.
[1] These stations do have their own problems: Endless layers of management and administration.
This is exacerbated by the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of news sources all paying someone to write an article about the same bit of information.
The industry is going to end up collapsing to a much smaller number of organizations and they'll likely become profitable as the user views aren't split among so many sources.
That judgment seems to be absurd, especially if they only provided a snippet of the article for data discovery purpose.
I'm not sure that would help those news firms if they get blackholed from Google altogether.
This ruling says google must provide a service, but they must also pay those who use it... How does this make any sense. It’s akin to the government forcing someone to stand at a street corner shouting and advertising for someone. However, every-time a persons goes into the business because your advertising you must pay that business...
Like can google just pull out France? I don't see how anyone could negotiate under such insanity?
Like the bigger issue is BS like AMP that will take traffic away from the sites. Why is that not a concern... Where as indexing things is an old idea. Like if you applied this to card catalogs, phone books, and heck references in papers this ruling makes no sense.
Structure your ranking algorithm to allocate a proportionate share of traffic to french news sites, given relevancy to a query topic, and rank order publishers by negotiated cost?
Given there is SUBSTANTIAL value in a news publisher being sent traffic, in terms of advertising and circulation, the power law in search engine clicks should keep cost paid to a bare minimum.
Unless the French are going full dystopia and picking the winners within their own markets?
Best way to ensure that Google stay super dominant.
Web Monetization API (ILP: Interledger Protocol)
> A JavaScript browser API which allows the creation of a payment stream from the user agent to the website.
> Web Monetization is being proposed as a #W3C standard at the Web Platform Incubator Community Group.
Interledger: Web Monetization API https://interledger.org/rfcs/0028-web-monetization/
Khan Academy, for example, accepts BAT (Basic Attention Token) micropayments/microdonations that e.g. Brave browser users can opt to share with the content producers and indexers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Basic_Atte...
Web Monetization w/ Interledger should enable any payments system with low enough transaction costs ("ledger-agnostic, currency agnostic") to be used to pay/tip/donate to content producers who are producing unsensational, unbiased content that people want to pay for.
Paywalls/subscriptions and ads are two other approaches to funding quality journalism.
Should journalists pay ScholarlyArticle authors whose studies they publish summaries of without even citing the DOI/URL and Title; or the journals said ScholarlyArticles are published in? https://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle
I'm fortunate I got to know the true internet. Truly one of the great wonders of this world.
This very site's terms of service infringes my rights by requiring arbitration. Can I do anything about it by legal means? Who knows? Could I even sue them to begin with? Could they even sue me? Do the terms even matter at all?
Now, a country can then hold anything they control as collateral for any other demand they make: France could block a site from the country, they could seize any assets that site has in the country, or arrest personnel in that country. France has a vested interest in not overplaying their hand, such that companies won't operate there at all, but effectively a country has complete power to demand anything in exchange for access to their country.
In that way, the Internet is not subject to any country's law in only that country, but every country's law in every country, insofar as those countries are places they want to do business.
Nothing here is new and the US is traditionally the largest user of this sort of power.
That's exactly what will turn the international network into regional ones with tightly controlled borders. Large groups of people simply won't be reachable from the outside. My country blocked WhatsApp for several days when it couldn't decrypt messages for the benefit of an investigation.
> they could seize any assets that site has in the country, or arrest personnel in that country
And then countries will start requiring that all data concerning their citizens be stored on computers located on their soil and therefore under their jurisduction. That almost made it into law here. How many sites are just gonna block the entire country in response to that? How many are going to be blocked for not complying?
I think that is a very charitable interpretation of what they're imposing, though it may not have been your intent. Rather than "guarantee rights", I think it is just an attempt to assert their powers as governments. Hence the push to collect taxes on internet services, break encryption, and so forth.
But yes, we're heading toward an increasingly-balkanized Internet.
Out of $160b in revenue in 2019, $134b of Google’s revenue came from ads. Most of the ad revenue is in the form of targeted ads, so if they stopped selling people’s information, they’d immediately go under.
Similar numbers apply to Facebook.
I honestly don’t understand where this argument that those companies don’t sell people’s information comes from. I hear it often enough to wonder if people are intentionally being disingenuous, astroturfing, etc...
You seem to have a much more expansive idea of what selling information means as compared to other commenters. Google collects information so that when a customer buys ads, they can serve those ads to the desired demographics. They don't sell info on which users belong to which demographics or other otherwise sell user information. While it's true that they monetize information in optimizing their ad placement, this is not what most people think of when they hear "selling user information.
Say I have a nail salon and I want to advertise. So I give out coupons to bakeries, coffee shops, etc. and tell storekeepers to hand out the coupons the customer's demographics (women, mostly, and maybe women with fancy nails in particular). When these storekeepers kept an eye out for women with fancy nails and gave them my coupon, did the sell their customer's information?
Don't want Google to benefit off your browsing-data? you can stop using their services.
Now, the question becomes, is that actually possible? If I stop using Google Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc. would they stop collecting my "user data"?
I can replace Google with Facebook/Amazon/Criteo/... or anyone involved in the ad-retargeting business.
That's why people say Google or FB sell data.
Google has never been caught doing anything of the sort but even sophisticated and savvy commentators like those you find on hn have a hard time distinguishing between the two companies, for reasons that escape my understanding.
Also these decisions are done on the national level - France can rule whatever they want, it has no impact on the other EU member states.
The latter are the ones burning the internet down with their walled gardens.
I do enjoy the irony of some Americans blaming big data companies when the president of their choice does not get elected, all the while advocating for less power to French news agencies (e.g. death by asphyxiation from Google news, without any recourse).
If I wanted to use only directories and webrings I could do so today. I'm fine with that. If I want to use Google I have to use Google terms. That's okay. If I don't, I can easily just not.
I don't think it'll last, though. The guys who blame tech companies for elections are the same guys saying they need to be regulated. And so eventually we'll have all these highly-regulated services instead of the thing I've enjoyed. But that's the tyranny of the majority, I suppose. I can find a way to work with it.
This decision would have necessarily been different if the case were about a diffuse Internet-native p2p app, but after this precedent has been set the legal system is now primed to see both the same way.
Twitter is pretty open, meaning you can write pretty much anything you want and it helped topple some power structures in middle east.
what do you think would happen in the USA if there were only open source software on the Internet?
Twitter is an extension of the US power structure. Destabilizing the Middle East is in line with US policy. But for example, where are the official Twitter accounts of ISIS et al?
We did literally base the US system of government on this concept.
"Press freedom" historically means that the press can publish anything factual, artistic, or opinion based without fear of government censorship or retribution.
We are seeing the EU and various EU countries redefine fundamental terms for entirely different things, to the point where the original rights are completely eroded, and instead we have a system that effectively serves special interest groups in Europe.
An infamous example of this is the "right to be forgotten". In Europe there is now a process where individuals can effectively censor the internet/press from publishing factual information about their past transgressions. Ostensibly this is to allow the individual to move on with their life. For example, someone convicted of murder has successfully removed articles related to his murder from the internet (in Europe). This is incredibly dangerous. Why should the government get to decide what fact based censorship is irrelevant or not? I certainly think it is pertinent for society to know about past murders.
The EU is slowly eroding all individual liberties, while its markets are becoming less competitive and its welfare state expands to unprecedented levels. Free speech and freedom or religion are much worse in Europe. Germany is run by a Christian political party. In addition to no longer being able to advocate for Nazi politics in Germany, now you cannot speak about certain facts that have occurred in the past. Now France is attempting this novel "shake down of tech giants we cannot compete with" strategy, which is frankly a strategy that was until recently more likely to be seen in an Authoritarian country like China than the country that was the inspiration for the US independence.
The United States declared independence in 1776, and the storming of the Bastille was in 1789.
I'm pretty sure the arrow of causality runs in the opposite direction from what you describe.
What did I just read.
If you want to scrape someone else’s work and display it next to your own ads, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask you to pay up.
Scraping their work is one thing but there's a difference between linking to their work with enough of a description so that people can decide whether they want to read it or not and using all of it wholesale.
Also you're straight up wrong about the ads and the news in France. Google has no ads on google news. That's what this is about. If you want to talk about the discovery app that's a wholly different beast and not under consideration for this law. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
I personally think they should just get their French news from Quebec. If there's no lower limit on the amount news agencies can charge google then just get an €1 annual license for content.
They key thing you're missing is that Google DID keep most of it's snippet content by getting the newspapers to sign free agreements. Google WAS given the option to just display nothing, they did not take it.
But requiring Google to both index all websites (in a separate attempt to mitigate the monopoly effect) and requiring Google to pay publishers to include content in search results certainly has a bad smell to it.
If Google had the option to not index the websites, then I'd say it's fine.
A traditional abuse of monopoly power is providing a good or service at a loss to gain control of a new market.
Exerting control over a market to raise prices is another traditional method for abusing monopoly power. This isn't what Google is doing re: news.
The method I'm referring to is where Google uses their existing monopoly position in one market (search) to exert control over another market (news publishing). See "predatory pricing", "dumping".
> Monopoly by definition already has 100% of the market
That is one definition. Other definitions are based on having the power to control a market, which doesn't always require having a particular share of a market.
Lots of G employees here.
Users love this -- I know that I do! But France is basically saying, if you want access to our population, you'll have to play by our rules. I think that is also fair; Google certainly plays by local rules elsewhere.
I think the concept of copyrights is fundamentally incompatible with an open web, ultimately. It should be that a webserver sending you a response to your request is an implicit usage license. After all, the webserver doesn't have to send you anything. If it does, we take that to be an implicit agreement that you can have and use the data. That should be codified as law, because it is the current convention.