Google Supports the News Industry

This argument fails when you consider Google pushing AMP on news organizations. It is akin to a news stand telling newspaper publishers "if you print your paper using my font and paper, I'll put you front and center, otherwise enjoy your paper's new placement on the back shelves".

The arguments are quite solid but I'm having a hard time swallowing that pill, what are the valid counter arguments here ? Not just "Google bad" but some actual examples of Google screwing with journalism. I feel like news agencies are using Google as a scapegoat, saying that what Google is doing (indexing their content) is wrong, but I'm not sure they'd be better off if Google decided to return a blank page for any news related search worldwide. We'd have to actually open their homepage yeah, or use RSS, which wouldn't be the end of the world as a user, but their articles would see way less traffic. Sounds to me like their argument is "business was better before the internet, Google is the internet, therefore Google should pay us for the damage".

This is a really hard problem because news is inherently biased, political in nature and the incentives are on all sides huge.

EU Copyright Directive is requiring tech giants to license the right to reproduce copyrighted material on their own websites. It could make it impossible for Google to display brief snippets and photos from news stories in its search results without paying the news sites.

As a consumer, I find it difficult to form a clear opinion about it:

At one side, I don't want Google to become too powerful and can filter what reaches me as "news". It is also not fair that Google is earning disproportionate amount of money by facilitating search on the content of news agencies while they aren't getting anything.

At the other side, I want to easily find different sources for news with different perspectives and I don't want to be dependent to a couple of big news agencies like AP and Reuters.

I guess there is simply no black and white solution and that a balance needs to be struck with policy for distributing the power in a weighted way between the different actors.

Sorry Google, but you've burned all of your good will long ago with the news business. The industry is decimated and you've taken all of the ad revenue while prioritizing a business model that all but forces the newspapers to give away their content.

I would never trust any plan from Google, especially one that claims to be "supporting" the news industry.

Google investigated Google and found nothing wrong.

It's a very bizarre and false claim that Google doesn't "use" news content and that they are doing this as some sort of altruistic system of "allowing these publishers to make money by showing their own ads". Google itself serves ads, runs a massive ad network and makes a ton of money in the process. Every point in this process that they touch, be it search results or AMP pages or even destination pages that use Google Analytics are of some benefit to Google either directly as ad revenue or indirectly as data capture.