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> Google is discriminatory as it applies to newspapers equal treatments, even if they are in different situations

This would appear to be the opposite of what "discriminatory" means.

Quite the opposite. The core idea of anti-discrimination law is simple: Treat people the same where they are the same and treat people different where they are different. Here the example of the rough sleeping tax applying equally to the homeless and those with homes is often used to illustrate latter.

Discrimination means recognizing the difference between things. You're insisting that discrimination is required to be non-discriminatory.

> You're insisting that discrimination is required to be non-discriminatory.

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".

Maybe not in French legalese.

That could certainly be the case, but...

(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.

How can someone negotiate a rate without the ability to walk away?

They do have the ability to walk away - just like users have the ability to walk away from Google. They can cease operations in France and remove themselves from France's jurisdiction (probably the whole EU, including their wonderful little tax haven). They did it to China once, if I remember correctly, after a series of state sponsored Gmail breaches. Don't want to pay? Don't participate.

I'm enjoying the schadenfreud even though I'm terrified of the implications for the rest of tech.

Can they instead simply start their own news gathering operation?

They'd get fined heavily for that... Using a monopoly position in one market to enter another...

If that were true, then Google can’t start any new information service businesses.

Is that what you are saying?

I'm sure they could start something in a different area where regulators arnt already breathing down their necks. France probably wouldn't react well to the specific plan to start a news org though.

France can pretend that Google doesn't exist.

You can't. It's fairly obvious they expect the publishers to come back and claim Google is being unfair and have the courts make up a rate.

> 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

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?

These claims seem irrelevant, inaccurate, or dumb.

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?

It's not bad, but they are not paying for this content, even if they have an incentive to display these abstracts (people using their tools). The law regarding the « droits voisins » (related rights) says it's a right to get a fair price for people using your content, and that's why Google has to pay if they want to display the content.

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.

A better summary.

Press freedom is fundamental. Monopoly must pay for press because they must show it. We demand they show it for press freedom.

> It's not bad, but they are not paying for this content, even if they have an incentive to display these abstracts

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'.

> it's a right to get a fair price for people using your content, and that's why Google has to pay if they want to display the content

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.

How would this hurt press freedom? You are still allowed to print what you want. Press freedom is not an entitlement to an audience.

Because they don't want people to learn about a topic by going to Google and entering a search term and then clicking on the links that they are free to use. This workflow inherently routes around publications requiring a subscription fee unless they have something unique to offer. It also tends to drive revenue towards zero whichis an existential threat.

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.