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Comment by throwaway2245 | Hacker News Reader

> If they didn't want their content to be indexed by search results, they could ask Google to remove it,

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.

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No, this is not the prisoner's dilemma, because the parties can communicate and are not bound to the original decision. What you're suggesting is that the news companies form a cartel.

> 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".

> ...granting very weird and very specific privileges to the very rich, very well-connected, very corrupt...

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.

> No, this is not the prisoner's dilemma, because the parties can communicate and are not bound to the original decision. What you're suggesting is that the news companies form a cartel.

The second sentence disproves the first. It's effectively a prisoner's dilemma because communication between the players is effectively infeasible through illegality.

What would happen for users if every news site decided to stop being indexed by Google? I think very little.

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.

> You're describing a classic prisoner's dilemma.

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.

> 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.

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.

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