I wish Google would finally go with the kneejerk reaction of just unlisting all these sites from Google Search and News.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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...
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 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.
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.