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> They get extra visibility + traffic clicks from Google -- but also want to be paid for it?!?

Visibility is not a meaningful "reward" for established European newspapers (they are not unknown hobby bloggers.) The issue is who is capturing revenue from the work. The newspapers make money from people browsing their site (long ad exposure) or paying for subscriptions.

The news model: journalists discover "news facts" which they make into "news stories" that can hold reader attention.

If Google collects all "news facts" in one place with their own ads, they are benefiting from journalists while undercutting the newspapers.

If the headline being the valuable content is true, it suggests there could be a business that's like a newspaper that only publishes headlines without articles.

I'm not saying this to refute your comment! This might actually be a valid idea.

I believe that would be Fark, or maybe Twitter.

Yes, also like Twitter in that the headline/tweet without substance is adequate for most people these days.

This is one reason why social media has been such a successful part of political disinformation campaigns.

>The news model: journalists discover "news facts" which they make into "news stories" that can hold reader attention.

>If Google collects all "news facts" in one place with their own ads, they are benefiting from journalists while undercutting the newspapers.

If "news facts" is the framework for the proposed logic of compensation, it is being applied inconsistently.

Consider the final result of 2 professional soccer teams playing a game: FC Barcelona beats Real Madrid 2-1. The "facts" were generated by the players + the referee + the official scorekeeper, etc. A French newspaper reports on it: https://www.leparisien.fr/sports/football/direct-suivez-le-c...

Using first principles of "facts generation", should the French newspaper be required by Spain to share a portion of the ad revenue to each soccer team and La Liga league? If no, why is that not hypocritical?

Same as Ryanair announces a new airline route and French newspapers report it. It doesn't mean French publishers should pay some of their ad money to Ryanair.

Likewise, if Google issues a press release saying the next "Pixel 7 phone will be available October 2021" and French newspapers report that fact, it doesn't mean they should owe Google money just because Google produced that headline.

Newspapers have traditionally benefited from headlines being generated by the entire world and they get ad money for it without paying the sources of those headlines.

If Google did include article snippets beyond the headlines, that seemed like a reasonable threshold to pay license fees to French newspapers. Otherwise, a pure headline display is a symbiotic relationship similar to the symbioses newspapers enjoyed with sports reporting, Hollywood celebrities, corporate press release announcements, etc. The newspapers want Google to pay for something the newspapers themselves don't want to pay for.

Perhaps under this logic Google should start their own newspaper, which reports the publication of every news story on every French news website. That way they are simply reporting the facts, and are no longer liable for copyright infringement!

If visibility is not a meaningful reward, then I guess Google should just blacklist these news sites from the search engine.

Somehow I have the feeling that news sites wouldn't be happy with that, I wonder why...

> Visibility is not a meaningful "reward" for established European newspapers

Why? There are two ways how I would land on a newspaper's page. One is if I read them regularly, then I just go to their website directly to check what's new. That's what their loyal audience does, and Google doesn't affect that.

Another one is that I'm googling for news about a specific event or specific person - then I go to whatever pages Google shows me. That's how newspaper expand their loyal audience.

It appears that they don't want it and prefer other terms - pay me and you can use my headlines. We cannot force newspapers to accept Google's headlines-for-clicks system against their will.

No, they want the audience google brings. They just want a share of googles profits, riding the anti google sentiment, google got for other things. Classic politics.

Yes, we can, that's what fair use is all about.

Can we force them to accept the reality of how the internet has operated for the last 4+ decades, or are they exempt from that as well?

I could be convinced that demanding to be removed from Google index is legitimate. But it's also not what newspaper want: they want to be indexed and be paid for it, no way for Google not to take the deal. That's state-supported extortion to me.

French newspapers clearly do want it as Google is being forced to display links to French newspapers by the French government.

And yet the same newspapers will protest vigorously is Google removes news completely. Google can opt out of this so called benefit without losing much. But newspapers desperately need this traffic.

Your theory that Google is benefiting more from this arrangement than the newspapers themselves isn’t true.

> And yet the same newspapers will protest vigorously is Google removes news completely. Google can opt out of this so called benefit without losing much. But newspapers desperately need this traffic.

Google can't actually. Google has been ordered to display links and snippets from French newspapers and is explicitly not allowed to remove French newspapers from their results.

That’s my point. The French newspapers need Google for traffic. And so they (unofficially) partnered with the French government and courts to complete the shakedown. The courts force the use of snippets, then the government says “well you’re using these snippets so you must pay for them”.

So, in practice, Google has been ordered to pay. As a European, I can't sympathize with the French newspapers.

Perhaps they can disable the news part completely when viewed from France or does this also include search results?

But only using links seems OK - people will go to the websites and see their ads...

When NYT references the work of The Intercept, as they have done recently, ought the NYT pay The Intercept? [1] And if I summarize the facts of a French news article, ought Google be disallowed from collecting my facts?

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/climate/epa-pfas-fracking...

> Visibility is not a meaningful "reward" for established European newspapers

This is prima facie false. Google is not permitted to simply deindex these papers. The newspapers are demanding to be indexed and referenced, and be paid for it. It's pretty clear here that Google is providing a service to the papers, not the other way around.

"...demanding... and be paid for it"

I'm suspecting it's more important that newspapers are to receive money (for services) than that they demanding to be indexed (requesting service). It's newspapers providing service to Google here, in the form of interesting data which attracts viewers.

Google was happy to refuse the "services" these newspapers were offering, by removing them from their index. The newspapers balked at that—because they get more value from being included in Google's index than they stand to "lose" from having Google show visitors just the headlines with links to the original sites. So they brought the government in to force Google to purchase the newspapers' services whether they wanted them or not.

>This feels more like a shakedown from French newspapers with backing from the France government rather than fair business compensation.

Not saying Google is right or wrong in this case but;

EU have had problems with US tech giant for years with their aggressive business practice and Tax avoidance. Aggressive or ruthless from European perspective but the norm from American's POV. Now that even US government are on their side, EU or France in this case are taking every single opportunity to squeeze them.

I see it as political power play more than anything else. Google and Apple have been showing middle fingers to government and regulators around the world for years. They have been waiting for the political climate to act on it.

> Aggressive or ruthless from European perspective but the norm from American's POV.

European international companies avoid taxes via tax havens like Ireland, the Netherlands and Malta just the same as US international companies.

Funnily enough, I stumbled on this data[0] for Ireland, 2016, total revenues booked by nationality of parent company:

China: $2.44bn

Luxembourg: $2.74bn

Italy: $5.86bn

Japan: $8.38bn

France: $18.67bn

Ireland: $77.95bn

US: $364.77bn

I know there other European states and microstates with interesting corporate tax rates. Would be interested to seem a similar comparison.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/07/13/bidens-tax-p...

It's important to note that the fine is not for violating copyright, but for defying an order by the antitrust regulator to have talks with newspapers about the issue.

I'm not sure what the intended procedure for "we believe we fixed the issue, we don't have to talk about it anymore" is, but whatever Google did apparently wasn't it.

Google didn't defy the order by not having had talks. They did talk with the French publishers, but the publishers felt Google didn't act in good faith in those talks.

To be a bit more precise, Google didn't provide all the information regarding their earning based on copyrighted content they display on their platform. They also unilaterally decided to exclude part of the press and part of the copyroghted content from negotiations. They also unilaterally made the negotiations specific to Google Showcase. The antitrust regulator is fining Google because they consider that all this is a systematic strategy to cause negotiations to fail rather than comply to the EU directive of 2019.

I don’t think this is specific to France or the EU. Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press_v._Meltwater_.... this kind of thing can happen in the USA, too.

Also, events as I understand them (but I may be mistaken) were:

- google shows headlines, excerpts, sometimes photos and videos in search results

- newspapers want compensation (IMO rightfully. Even if Google brings them more/better visitors than they had before Google did that, there’s no law that forbids companies from making stupid decisions, and it’s their content)

- court orders Google to negotiate about the price for showing content.

- Google removes some French papers completely from search results, stating that would change if they let them show results without payments.

- newspapers see that as misuse of market power (IMO it’s up for debate whether that’s fully true. I don’t know, for example, whether google also said “but we want to show more than headlines, and pay for it” and acted like it)

- court, taking what happened into account fines google, claiming it didn’t try to negotiate in good faith. I don’t know the details, but can think of scenarios where that makes sense.

Imagine if academics had to pay publishers a fee for each citation they make. It's beyond me why anyone thinks requiring payment for linking (or citing) is a good idea.

Academics don't make money from publishing

Maybe not academics but publishers absolutely do in many academic fields. It's the reason Sci-Hub exists at all.

Besides, whether you make a profit is hardly relevant to this topic. You could make no profit at all and still be accused of copyright infringement.

I don't see how this is related. Academics get enough tanglible benefit from being cited so they are more than ok with being cited and quoted. News publishers don't make enough and are not happy about it. Copyright infringment is usually not litigated unless someone loses money.

> I don't see how this is related.

Well, I said what if "academics had to pay publishers a fee for each citation they make." In this situation, publishers like Elsevier would be able to extort even more money from academics, and ultimately from taxpayers. I'm sure publishers would be very happy about that while making everyone else miserable.

> Copyright infringment is usually not litigated unless someone loses money.

Partly true. Copyright infringement is litigated when the one suing believes there is money to be made. It doesn't matter where "the money lost" actually belongs to, as evident by court cases ruling in copyright troll's favor. It also doesn't matter whether the one being sued made any money too.

But the most absurd assumption here is that linking has to benefit the creator of the content. If that is the case, no one would have the freedom to criticize the works of others online, or risk being sued of copyright violation. That's not even remotely close to what copyright was supposed to be all about.

Academics make their whole careers from being cited.

So even just linking the headlines _without_ the snippets was still not in compliance.

Next they'll discover that it's the URIs themselves which can reveal the headline very well such as in:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/france-fines-google-500-m...

Most news is nothing more than the headline and even if there's more to it, it's a known problem that people are not reading the article.

Just the headlines create a business for many, like the forums or search engines. You need only the headline to stimulate engagement and show ads but that headline often is generated through the work of many people that are not the beneficiary of that engagement and ad business.

If the headline had no IP value, Google and others would have been generating them without actual connection to reality instead of fetching them from those who send paid employees for on site observations to gather information that would be evaluated and the converted into a headline/title .

I don't say that the French approach is the correct one but obviously the alternative is also not problem free.

I suppose this sort of thing isn't common in France? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-57814894

> We have 30+ years of the world wide web being built on referred url links (with no snippets) without monetary payment but now French news organizations want compensation for it.

An injustice existing for a long time does not mean it should continue unabated. Google and Facebook have profited from the work of news organizations and contributed little back. And the way they display snippets, unfortunately, often prevents news orgs from capturing that revenue.

If you can't innovate, litigate.

Sadly, it's becoming EU's business model.

Not sadly. Fortunately.

If you hate the EU, sure. But I live here and I would’ve liked it to become more business friendly, competitive and innovative instead.

Google is not known as a friendly, competitive company. Google has a monopoly with Android and privacy laws are completely ignored.

It would have been great to see them tell Google to deindex them and then they create FrenchNewsSearch.fr or whatever to actually compete, but sadly they just get the government to do the dirty work.

Innovate like google: find new ways to avoid the law.

HN is not making money by displaying those links

Why do you say that? HN has ads (job ads for YC startups) and also is effectively advertising for YC itself. Without links, no one would come here.

Indirectly. Google places advertisments next to those links (that nowadays look exactly like those links) so we know there is a certain monetary value to every click. If HN sold ad links, and had a scale near google's, i'm sure it would be a candidate to be sued under the same laws too.

These laws are bandaids of course, but the argument that these newspapers "They get extra visibility + traffic clicks" is moot these days - what will they do with that visibility? Would be cool if visibility amounted to advertising money, but google also controls the ad market and the ad money that they make is not sustainable.

US publications have (by now) solved this by shutting down or installing paywalls. But that doesnt work in EU where GDP is at least 30% lower and the local language audience is a fraction of the english audience. It is an untenable situation, and the fact that google can keep paying fine after fine but keep working in the continent is proof that the market is captured in an unsustainable vortex.

So there are going to be a few ways out of this:

- Countries/EU keep fining google for a few years , a solution that is going nowhere

- Google will have to introduce news payments programs in EU / australia etc that pay well

- Google is forced out of the market via protectionism in order to foster local solutions like China and Russia do

- Or publishers themselves will collectively create a rival service for news that pays per click a-la spotify, and remove themselves from google

It's the question of scale. For example, it's one thing to take a photo of a street, and another one to photograph all streets and buildings creating a visual representation of the whole country. Sovereign countries have the right to decide certain things are not in the best interests of their citizens and ban such activities, regardless of what is our opinion of it.