French news sites prevail in negotiations with Google over "neighboring rights”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Before craigslist and property listing companies like right move, local newspapers had 30-40% margins
(source a senior press officer I worked on a project with)
As a society we are paying a heavy price for this stupidity
Personally I think there should be state funding for unbiased news so that neither the reader nor Google need to pay directly, but that's not where we are right now, all the important journalism is published by for-profit websites and it's behind paywalls. Given that, I don't think it should be surprising if a news site sees Google harvesting paragraphs from their articles and embedding them into results and goes 'hey, who said you could do that without paying for it?'
Google Search infoboxes for a person or place or other topic typically are crammed full of information that Googlebot pulled from various parts of the internet. It's really useful to have that info! But if the websites that the info was sourced from rely on ad revenue, well, Google's spider didn't click on any ads.
I don't think Google paying news sites for the privilege of indexing them is going to fix the revenue model for online news, but I also don't believe that the value of those news snippets is zero. As the article notes, their attempted solution was to switch to Headlines Only (which is what I get in the US right now), but the court objected since that was an obvious attempt to avoid paying by shipping an inferior product.
This is just "Europe trying to somehow regulate big tech chapter #N-plus-one", and while I do actually sympathize with the broader goal, news companies of all people complaining about Google don't deserve any compassion whatsoever.
Also, the major driver of this news is Google's attempts to get Australia to drop legislation. Australia is about as far away from Europe as you can get
This isn't a fair characterization. They want their content to be indexed by Google, and furthermore most of those entities have separate distribution channels (television networks, print newspapers, etc.) that Google can't touch. Most people don't want to buy newspapers or watch news channels, but frankly they are absolutely correct, because 99% of that is freaking garbage no better than your average Facebook group.
> Australia
s/Europe/politicians-worldwide/g
My point wasn't about Europe in particular (just observing that this kind of move, for better or for worse, is more popular in the EU). Again, I do agree that we should do something about Google & friends, but this piece of legislation is the classical politician's fallacy: we should do something, this is something, hence this is good.
I would argue most people don't want to buy newspapers because we have created an expectation that content should be free.
As to the quality of the content, a) that's subjective and b) it can be seen as natural evolution of an industry whose income source has been decimated by Google/Facebook. It's a lot cheaper to produce what you (and I do as well, to be fair) consider garbage than to produce the quality content we would like to see coming from newspapers.
It's like if there were a single supermarket chain and they refused to carry a product. Oh well. Customers don't really like it, but in the grand scheme the supermarket doesn't care.
There are also real issues about value creation and value capture in economies. Some places are good at one and not the other.
Google depends on 'the content of the world' being given to them for free, they'd be nothing without it, by being a 'single point of access' it gives them a lot of power.
So free market arguments apply, but it's still more complicated.
There are basically zero markets in which there is one completely dominant player due to the nature of 'product quality' alone, there are always external factors or even natural artifacts of the system that facilitate a dominant player.
For the same reason that YC companies don't go ahead and just compete with airliner manufacturers such as Boeing whereupon the only competition is derived from massive, state-backed players - it is not possible to complete with Google today.
The barriers to entry towards building a great search engine are likely more insurmountable than even those for airline carriers, the notion that some entity with the 'right stuff' could go ahead and do it is laughable at face value.
Compounded with the fact that Google has entrenched and most likely anti-competitive distribution to market via Android, Chrome - the argument becomes moot.
So first, we need to separate Android, Chrome and Google at very least, and then ensure that access to browsing technologies is on a truly level playing field. That would be a good start.
At this point, frankly, many other browser technologies - even those materially inferior would start to come to the fore - which is probably illustrative of where the 'true power' of Google comes from, i.e. more from distribution dominance than from actual search tech.
While we are at it we can legislate grounds for app competition, platform openness, personal data ownership and the rules concerning the objective self-regulation of social media companies.
At the same time, we shouldn't leave the 'sleeping giant' MS Windows distribution monopoly out of our sights either.
Google has been a barrier to progress for almost a decade now, they are just another Oracle but with pink and green hair.
And yet, Standard Oil put them all out of business somehow.
Your comment fails to address market structure and externalities: Baidu and Yandex are both strategic investments by national players for what are de facto protected industries.
It's futile to compare Baidu and Google on a 'free market basis', ironically, doing so rhetorically will yield for you some understanding of Google's position.
And of course: "Google being popular doesn't stop a competitor from serving the exact same results."
This is false, and if it were true, would undermine your own argument.
DDG/Bing has some good results, but generally not competitive on the whole with G particularly in the long tail - and the tail is very long.
Second - if they did actually have results of 'equal quality' then why would Google own 95% of the market?
Because people just randomly and arbitrarily chose Google over competitors for no reason related to quality?
Or could it be that market structure and distribution (and long-tail quality, which is an insurmountable problem) are impossible to achieve.
Put differently Google is the default option on a lot of platforms, because Google uses it's market power to ensure that.
The analogy would be: "The Supermarket sells one kind of water. It's water. The same as all other water and it's the same price. It's called Google water, it's right there at checkout, you can pick up unlimited quantities" - and if you prompt, and ask about it, you may find out that there are 'other brands' of water available, and yes, it's probably of the same quality, but if you wait a few minutes, the clerk can go into the back and maybe find some'.
Google owns all of the shelf space.
In a close real world analogy - it's for the same reason that you can only get 'Coke' or 'Pepsi' in many situations, and for the same reason there is no '3rd Cola'.
Contemplate the situation with that question: "If DDG etc. produce the same results, why does everyone chose G?" because that will unpack a lot for you.
Because Google is the best search engine in the same way the iPhone is the best phone. That doesn’t mean an Android phone can’t do all the same things an iPhone can. That doesn’t mean DuckDuckGo can’t find you all the things Google can.
You're describing a classic prisoner's dilemma.
That is, it's in the interest of the news industry as a whole to not list their content for free, but if individual news companies do that, they will lose out relative to the alternative, so every individual news company is trapped in a situation they don't prefer.
Google set this prisoner's dilemma to their advantage, using their position as a monopoly power to create it. It's reasonable, then, for the EU and the news industry to seek to remove Google's monopoly advantages.
> It's reasonable, then, for the EU and the news industry to seek to remove Google's monopoly advantages.
Yes, it is. But this legislation does nothing to attempt to break Google's monopoly, while at the same time granting very weird and very specific privileges to the very rich, very well-connected, very corrupt news company owners.
Google is absolutely a monopoly and is absolutely abusing that position. We should stop the monopoly situation, not introduce very weird stuff that just so happens to favor people with no reasonable claims whatsoever except "I'm friends with the regulator".
I agree - and this solution has been agreed by Google because it suits their interests. They now get to collude with other powerful actors without having to worry about the less powerful (and have set this as an available precedent across the EU).
I would find it more satisfying if Australia called Google's bluff and told them where to go.
The second sentence disproves the first. It's effectively a prisoner's dilemma because communication between the players is effectively infeasible through illegality.
And, at the root of it, is ad-based business model. That's one of the many reasons I believe ad-subsidizing should be made illegal: it's anticompetitive and antisocial, in that the moment you start doing it, competitors need to follow suit, and you destroy the possibility of competing using honest, ethically above-board business models.
In some cases we'd probably even benefit, because the news sites will stop being ranked higher than the primary sources themselves. Quite often when I Google the release of a new product or some new government policy the highest ranked results are all news articles. They bury the actual press release that the government or company themselves posted.
No it isn't, because what they do has very little to do with what anybody else does.
If your options are get listed for free or don't get listed at all, you have the incentive to be listed because the traffic makes you more money than not. This is true regardless of what anybody else does. Meanwhile anybody choosing to be listed doesn't hurt the people choosing not to be -- it hurts the other people who are, by providing more news sources in the Google search results and diluting their traffic.
What you're really saying is that if the largest news corporations form a de facto cartel through the use of the legislature to prevent Google from freely linking to everyone, they can monopolize the industry by disabling a discovery mechanism for independent news competitors.
No, they can't. The first answer to the Google issue from the French press was sensible. Individualy they know their content is worth money but individualy they are weak so they try to form a syndicate to negociate with Google in a pay-or-nothing position. But Google argued the French equivalent of fair use allowed them to scrap titles for free.
The French competition regulator had to intervene to force Google to go negociate. You can't negociate in good faith with a monopoly like Google. As the USA has apparently decided it won't apply its antitrust law in order to protect the international competitiveness of its abusive companies, obviously Europe will have to rein them in.
Google doesn't want it. Bing wouldn't accept it. DuckDuckGo wouldn't accept it. Qwant probably wouldn't, for that matter. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and HN wouldn't (in fact, Reddit actively lobbied against the EUCD).
The publishers went after Google because it's both the biggest mark and also the most unpopular.
If they wanted to be principled, they'd apply the same law to Bing, Facebook, Reddit, etc. Except they won't, because Bing, Facebook and Reddit would simply remove any links to French news sites, and they would be hard pressed to make a case for monopoly power when every single content platform reacts the same way.
Also, where do you draw the line on what content Google should have to pay to index? What about independent bloggers for example? This policy could potentially open a whole new can of worms.
Google's optimal position would be if you keep searching for the stuff you are looking for and get distracted by ads and buy something in the process.
The second best thing would be if you find the stuff you are looking for directly on Google(Google no longer shows only search results but the content of the results as if it comes from them) and then you proceed to buy something through an ad click.
For example, Google wins if you search for "When did Trump leave the White House" and you see a snipped containing "Trump left the WH in the early morning of January 20, 2021 using a helicopter". Now that you have your answer through the content that Google mined for free, they can monetize you but what about the people who put together that information? Why they would be left out of your business? What's fair about that?
There was a recent HN discussion about Google mining the database of a small business that specialises on compiling information on the wealth of celebrities. They lost most of their traffic when Google began showing the answer from their database directly instead of showing the link that contains this information. Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24105465
I completely agree on the second point. Google's 'Featured Snippets' are a clear overreach where Google uses people's content at no cost and gives nothing in return. This needs to be regulated because nobody is going to opt-out. For example, I've had some featured snippets and they bring a lot of traffic. Much less than a normal first place listing but more than a second place listing. If I opt-out of Featured Snippets in protest then someone else will just happily take that spot.
Perhaps the balance lies in just indexing headlines of sites. Then publishers could decide if they want to give up that information in their headlines. It's a tough to know where to draw the line but that seems like it's been the fairest balance so far.
I'm actually curious now about the principle here. Can the same idea be applied to the news websites themselves? If a news organization links to a Twitter thread then can Twitter or the users of Twitter demand payment from the news organization? If not, why not? What if it's a blog instead?
If it's a blog on a site you control, you can control that license
The crux is that all those "information" sites want you to click even if you are totally not interested with the story.
That's why you get all those titles like "prime minister was running around naked", so you think "what the heck is going on with our PM", and then it turns out it was prime minister of some obscure country and it happened 30 years ago.
Today clicks matter, page overlay adds matter, subscription invitations matter, and so on. Google cuts significant number of those if you can see a snippet of the article and it is clear that there comes some cheap click-bait.
Or watch right wing videos in youtube in incognito mode and compare home page recommendations with the ones in your regular account.
Historically, they've also changed their search algorithms to prioritize certain types of web properties over others (for example the Google Panda update). Etc.
Ah, yes. Just like when we don't want to pay people for their work. "But it will give you visibility and attract customers (for your free content anyway)".
If news websites where unhappy about the deal they are free to use robots.txt and search engines will ignore them. So, clearly they receive some benefit and are simply arguing they should receive more.
In short, Google decides how many people sees your site and how much Google pays for those views. News sites have no power to negotiate without government intervention.
No intermediary needed, newspapers used sell advertising directly.
Option one, they separate to keep the market. Probably not, but maybe if the whole EU does it.
Option two, Google is banned from France and some competitors take root. Those competitors are not going to limit themselves to the market in France, so now there is more competition everywhere.
Either one is a pretty good kick in the pants that would increase the level of competition.
Because Google pays massive fees to be the "default search" on millions of computers. Why would they pay so much for that. They insert themselves between then computer user and the path to finding the media sources. Nerds may know how to get past middlemen if they need to, but most people using computers do not know how.
The problem is that they were going beyond indexing: they were lifting content from the article wholesale and embedding it into search results (without permission).
They do this with all sorts of other stuff too, news sites aren't the only ones who get irritated by it.
From your quote:
> brief excerpts
Yes, but your full quoted text further explains that even just linking the headlines _without_ the snippets was still not in compliance.
We have 30+ years of the world wide web being built on referred url links (no snippets) without monetary payment but now French news organizations want compensation for it. I don't understand that logic. They get extra visibility + traffic clicks from Google but also want to be paid for it?!?
If after a Apple WWDC event, the front page of HN is filled with url links to Apple press releases and announcements, it doesn't mean HN should pay money to Apple Inc to send eyeballs to "apple.com". Linking to other urls (for free) is how the web works.
IMO, removing the embedded snippets should have been enough.
How is this not straight up copyright infringement? Or have the sites agreed to it and are now just being whiny babies?
Or to put it differently, we need more WSJ and NYT, less Breitbart and Buzzfeed.
This is pure regulatory capture from media corporations.
This is why this law is so terrible. If the government wants news media to keep its role in society, it should not force a private entity to pay a "failed to monetize the web"-tax.
News companies cannot demand payment while they demand that Google indexes their pages for them. The lobbying of the news industry it truly terrible and has made me question if I want to pay for any news media when the national news service is perfectly fine and accessible for free. I want to support independent journalism, but I don't want to sponsor the moneymaking schemes they're inserting into the law.
You have got it wrong.
Nobody asks of Google that they pay for indexing news sites in Google Search. And no news company wants to force Google to include their content in Google News.
The thing is there are two different services, Google News and Google Search. The news companies have a beef with Google News. Google has been saying: if you do not accept us using your content in Google News, we will remove you from Google Search.
That's 100% what the French media asked for.
What they wanted was essentially for Google to pay them a "You make money doing what we used to have a monopoly on" tax; they got mad when Google dodged the tax by following the letter of the EUCD and removing quoted snippets from searches.
Agree to pay in France while testing removal of news results in Australia.
So at least three test cases, and I guess there are more.
Google is eating up the lunch of news, so news have to find another way to monetize. Of course, we come slowly but surely to the understanding that News are essential to the society even without generating profit. But who pays the bills??
Government cant without making them depended on them and hence biasing the news. People are not seeing the immediate value since they are spoon fed this clickbait, bigot garbage and they think they are "up to date. Forcing the ads behemoths to share the pie seems like a logical step, although, its ill-executed and ofc the incentive for Google would be to minimize that cost.
This game is now getting started.
In lest corrupt countries but still with corrupt journalistic ethics the news becomes the ads.
The entire tech journalism business revolve around this. Give me good reviews and I will send you demo units, I will take you to a camp and will give you real good accommodation and slap a paid promotion video order as an extra.
extra governmental political journalism is also not any better. You become a mouthpiece for a political group and the funnel money to sustain your publication.
You can tap ads business for the stuff that is not allowed to be openly advertised. For example, in some places where doctors are not allowed to advertise the news channels will offer an interview about certain illness in exchange of payment from the interviewer. The news sites get their content and get paid for it, the doctors get their name on news articles that looks legit journalistic work.
It's really unfortunate.
Personally I think it would make much more sense to raise a general corporate profit tax, and use the proceeds of that tax to pay the news. But there's a convenient devil to extract money from, so there it is.
How the French News groups don't see this is beyond me, but there seems no limit to the level of stupid coming from European publishers. They probably even think they've finally won, and that News Showcase is a brilliant way to segment their premium content. It's going to be interesting to see how this plays out, but my bet is Google just completely blindsided them - pass the popcorn.
Yes I know it's only tangentially related, but I believe most regulations against big tech only establish their domination. These companies can likely invest more resources in legal analysis than the goverment, so they will use most of it to their advantage.
Laws should be as general as possible. We have robots.txt, you can even add some new marker, if some news site doesn't want to have it content fetched in an automated way, let it have that but it's already a slippery slope because why should a human be able to read it and write an article citing source if a program cannot do that.
This is likely just change for Google though. They probably consider the value of showing French newspaper content to be higher than whatever the price has been set.
Even though I believe that a solely “mechanical”/“logical”interpretation of laws, misses the point in some really important ways.
Approaching law/justice systems as a computer system to be manipulated, usually results in the judge seeing through the manipulation and cracking down on it, while still enforcing the spirit of the law rather than adhering to mechanical minutiae..
(Modulus the differences between common law and civil law jurisdictions, which probably colours my view)
Most contradictions in civil law seem to either be from really old law (think, pre french revolution/napoleonic period) or from weird edge cases which get covered by two laws which contradict themselves.
The first one is usually not resolved because it is just straight up ignored. There was a famous example of this a couple of years ago about a law which prohibited people from carrying swords/knives inside city walls.
If that were true, or true to the degree suggested here, I don't think these companies would fight regulation as hard as they do. Rather, they'd embrace them and encourage more.
IMHO, this kind of thinking is an interesting bit of free market propaganda, to the effect of convincing people that they're helpless in the face of domination by some corporation or other, and their only option is to wait patiently for some market-driven "creative destruction" to occur in the (perhaps far) future.
Now this cost is additional entry cost for new companies, unless the law is passed specifically with the original company name with it, which I think should never be the case because law should apply equally to everybody.
High entry cost is exactly how monopolies are created.
Creating a youtube clone is much simpler than creating a youtube clone that doesn't brake any existing laws and regulations. Every additional regulation is making it harder.
Case in point, I've run a forum for coders for 15 years with thousands of users. When the GDPR came out, I did not have time to make sure I follow it, the cost was too high, I shut it down. And of course the law was to protect users privacy from big evil companies. Guess who had money and resources to make sure they follow it.
Though, that's an exceedingly narrow perspective, judging things exclusively on the effect on startup costs and ignoring everything else. An increase in startup costs often is an acceptable price to pay in order to achieve other goals. For instance, environmental regulations definitely make it more expensive and difficult to spin up many kinds of industrial plants (e.g. plant builders need to buy pollution control equipment and use more expensive processes that create less pollution), but it means less unhealthy air and rivers that can support life and don't catch on fire [1]. All the competition in the world won't achieve that.
I think it's pretty useless to talk about "regulations" generically. It's really only helpful to talk about the costs and benefits of particular regulations, since that's the only context where you can figure out if the regulation is a net good or not.
[1] https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Cuyahoga_River_Fire
> Case in point, I've run a forum for coders for 15 years with thousand of users. When the GDPR came out, I did not have time to make sure I follow it, the cost was too high, I shut it down. And of course the law was to protect users privacy from big evil companies. Guess who had money and resources to make sure they follow it.
While that may have been a negative to you personally, the alternative is to allow those big companies to violate users' privacy in ways the law forbids, which is worse. Also, I'm a little skeptical that the GDPR would actually placed much if any burden on site such as yours.
I mention regulations in general and not particular one, because the context that you are talking about is placed within bigger context of everything around changing. And once law is put in place is almost never removed.
Re forum, collecting emails seem to count as personal data, maybe the amount of work wouldn't be high, but researching what do I really need to do, how to register personal data database etc. was high, there were not much info available at the time. AFAIR changes were pretty brutal to me since I was miraculously running on some very deprecated phpBB with a few manual patches which kept bots away.
And wow, I think what we currently consider to be a polluted river is pretty clean in historical context.
But you can't connect abstract "regulations" to any kind of bigger context for a cost/benefit analysis. You can for a particular regulation or a particular set of regulations, though.
I believed stuff like "regulations are only added never removed" and "government always grows, never shrinks," but that's empirically false. I read all about how the ICC's regulatory regime was awful in Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, but it turns out by that time it had already been abolished: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Commerce_Commission....
I don't think it's a bad thing to periodically revisit regulations and revise/abolish them if they're no longer needed or can be improved. However, I think it a lot of cases, regulation is actually a set of solutions to problems, and repealing the regulation will just unsolve those problems.
> Re forum, collecting emails seem to count as personal data, maybe the amount of work wouldn't be high, but researching what do I really need to do, how to register personal data database etc. was high, there were not much info available at the time. AFAIR changes were pretty brutal to me since I was miraculously running on some very deprecated phpBB with a few manual patches which kept bots away.
IIRC, I think they do, but from my employer's GDPR training, all you'd have to do is not use the emails you collected for a purpose other than what you obtained consent for. E.g. if you collected them for account maintenance notifications, you can't turn around and build a marketing list from them without getting additional consent from the user.
Music and video producers make money because they license their content for streaming and online purchases. I'm at a loss for why the news media hasn't figured out how to do this yet. My fear is that ultimately the market values news too little.
Most startups have been great for the world. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple. They've made our world so much better.
But old power structures are all about the status quo.
Strictly, this particular thing isn't why the next such useful startup won't be from France. It just showcases the way that country's power structures operate. They're heavily status quo oriented. It's always about "how do we pay the current church its tithe".
This claim about massive corporations making the world better is disputed.
Enjoy the free money.
This is exactly why the next Google won't be a French company.
I haven't yet formulated a complete opinion on this whole situation though. On the one hand the issue of Google showing better and better results based on someone else's content is clever and good for their users while on the other it is to the detriment of the creator of that content.
So how is the eligibility being determined and what is the process to get the money?
I have a hard time following the idea that google should use its dominant market position to force others into submission. This sounds distinctively worse than convincing a democratically elected government that you need protection (e.g., because the market is failing to some degree and your industry is important for the country in some form). This wouldn't be a good result for consumers either.
Google is not an underdog screwed by some corrupt government and is just too honest and noble to bribe the law away or invest in any form of lobbying.
I for one think news industry is worse than worthless. No news would be better than current news. I think there is a need for information but news is selectively picked information turned into entertainment. I don't think we are better informed nor in any other way better off because of this junk. Let it fail and see what comes up next.
If it's just a case of legally avoiding the new law, it's not a case of using "its dominant position to force others into submission." If they remove the smallest level of what makes them noncompliant, which in this case might be removing search outright (because otherwise they are supposed to link to and pay the news sites), to me that's fair game and not monopolistic. If they threaten to do something to unrelated things like Gmail or GCP, that's not OK.