Google, Meta executives push back against Canada online news bill
reuters.com
reuters.com
Man Bites Dog: NY Times, CBC, Toronto Star, National Post
As long as you aren't borrowing their content, including their headline, I don't see that they have any basis for a complaint.
My guess would be that Google and Meta simply don't want to pay a human being when an algorithm doesn't draw a salary.
Reason being, they get paid for publishing content, and Google and Meta make money off it.
Regardless of what most people believe about social networks and search engines "helping" these media outlets be known, reality is that they don't do it from the kindness of their hearts. Google and Meta profit from linking and publishing these contents.
Large companies like to frame this kind of stuff as a slippery slope and an anti-consumer move, because it is a more sympathetic approach than just saying "we want to keep making money and not spending a dime".
And I get it, news outlets also want money. But again, this is not an apocalyptic scenario where consumers get screwed over news corporations greed, it is just resistance from even larger corporations to pay a share of their profits to content creators.
It's also largely about who has pull in government to reroute $$ from one corporation to another. CBC type outlets have plenty of backers in Canadian gov that pull this sort of thing off. Similar to the Canadian film industry being propped up by government.
The costs to consumers isn't always just they have to pay more or not. It's about what content they won't get (legal) access to. Similar to the difference between chilling speech vs censorship. There's so many small products/services you don't get as Canadians, that are freely available in the US and other countries, often for tenuous long-forgotten reasons.
Publishers' relevance on, say, Google, relies partly on sponsored contents. They pay Google for this.
Publisher' income online is driven, by a very large margin, by advertisers. The largest online advertisement platforms are owned by both Facebook and Google. They essentially get a 68% cut from either of them. 32% goes to Facebook/Google.
Publishers relying on Google for content search get 51% of the ad revenue generated by it. 49% goes to Google.
One can see why Google and Facebook are in business with media publishers.
Now, Google News (the app) has 142 million active users. Google does not generate any of the content, and since most users only read headlines and skip the contents [0], this means that Google is making a boatload of money off contents they don't own, for people who aren't interested in going to the source.
That is the problem here.
And if Google or Meta were honest about it, they would just remove all the news links and shut down their news sites. Instead, they make a fuss about how unjust is for users to not have access to news through their platforms, and how news outlets benefit from their augmented outreach, like neither Meta nor Google are making money off it.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/03/19/am...
You claim that publishers are paying Google and Meta to be in these aggregators. But the aggregators are the problem and should spontaneously shut down? If the model sucks, publishers should stop paying.
The argument you’re making is basically equivalent to saying that Chipotle burritos are making me fat, therefore Chipotle should close all their locations instead of you know, me taking responsibility by not eating there.
I feel like you haven't used Google recently.
They have compartmentalized certain results, and created products around them, e.g. news, travel, places. They also have summarized some results and added them as short answers to common questions related to search terms, which means that you don't leave Google's page for content created and hosted somewhere else.
The most obvious case is where you search for, say, a historical person, and instead of giving you the link to Wikipedia, it shows literal Wikipedia content as a sort of widget on the right column.
How is any of this fair to content creators?
> The argument you’re making is basically equivalent to saying that Chipotle burritos are making me fat, therefore Chipotle should close all their locations instead of you know, me taking responsibility by not eating there.
They should be if Chipotle was virtually the only restaurant in town, and the only way for you to get food, which is essentially what Google is in the search space.
> Publishers' relevance on, say, Google, relies partly on sponsored contents. They pay Google for this.
I understand that Google has optimized to avoid the user clicking away. Obviously, this has been done to keep eyeballs and revenue but it is also arguably in the user’s interest as they accomplish their goals faster.
The logical response for this is not to force Google to pay for listing and summarizing links, but to evolve your own business model. Say by moving towards richer, more thoughtful content and analysis that can’t be trivially summarized and might even support a non-ad-based model, such as subscriptions or donations. (I pay for quite a few subscriptions that host content like this.) The basic news business has obviously become increasingly commoditized, and I don’t think anything Google does is going to change this.
The Wikipedia example is actually supporting the viability of good content being a defense for commoditization, not the argument that Google needs to pay content creators to survive. I don’t think there’s any evidence to support the idea that Google summarizing in a one box has harmed Wikipedia, as the Wikimedia foundation has continued to substantially grow its revenue every year and is at all time highs. Arguably, this is because they host content that is sufficiently rich that they are bound to have a decent click-through rate; whereas many news publishers are basically rewriting AP releases with little value add.
> They should be if Chipotle was virtually the only restaurant in town, and the only way for you to get food, which is essentially what Google is in the search space.
It is a strange proposition that if someone doesn’t like the only restaurant in town then it has a moral obligation to close its doors. It’s not like you have an obligation to go there; in this analogy consider opening a new restaurant as trying to do direct ad selling, but you can just as easily “cook at home” by shifting your business model. It might be different if the business was critical and had total monopoly (e.g. water, power) but I’m not sure this holds here.
Just as the restaurant is not required to cater to your specific tastes, I don’t think Google should be required to subsidize a specific publishing business model. It feels like a very narrow form of digital Luddism. Now maybe they are somewhat parasitic in this case, and would be smart to figure an more mutually beneficial arrangement (just as the restaurant would be smart to cater broadly to local tastes), but I wouldn’t go so far as to say “should” or expect any mandate to do so.
Can anyone help me understand this statement?
Not sure if it's post lunch lethargy or need for caffeine, but I'm not grasping this argument.
The real problem seems to be that monetizing news content to the point that it can support large, effective organizations has become quite difficult: print ads are basically dead, inserting ads into online content doesn't seem to be working that well, and getting people to pay you directly (i.e., subscriptions) is more of a challenge than ever.
Smaller boutique outlets like podcasts or email newsletters (chiefly Substack) have been effective in some cases, but that's not the kind of thing that can fund foreign bureaus or longform investigative journalism.
Because people usually don't stop to read articles in full, this would also not drive any traffic to the original publishers' websites.
Maybe the fix isn't to go hustle some rent out of "evil foreign tech giants" but simply to... write articles people want to read!
First, it doesn't address the problem, because the problem is that people don't want to read articles. It happens everywhere, even in HN you could often see people commenting on headlines instead of articles.
Second, news are supposed to be informative, not appealing. Writing just the things people want to see is how tabloids work.
Third, you got it backwards. Google is feeding from the news publishers, not the other way around. Without these, Google would have no news contents.
In contrast, other sites like YouTube or Instagram actually host and pay for content. In essence, Google is saying that they don't need to pay for news content they post in their website, but they will pay for it if it is posted as a video.
If the consumer doesn't want a product... it's somewhat the consumer's fault?
"but they don't want cigarettes sir! Maybe they just don't understand cigarettes..."
> Third, you got it backwards. Google is feeding from the news publishers, not the other way around. Without these, Google would have no news contents.
Google feeds the publishers, not the other way around. A significant portion of their traffic comes directly from Google. The other way around simply doesn't happen.
Google doesn't have news content. It's a link aggregator.
Honestly, they should just de-list Canadians outlet from their platform. Redirect to blogs or international outlets... Let the media companies build their own aggregator if they don't like the current ones.
One could buy a burger at McDonald's immediately, or wait for half hour in line to get a healthier and better sandwich at a shop down the road.
The fact that McDonald's is more convenient, does not make it better.
Consumers want to eat, and they want to read news, but most of the time they don't want all that comes attached to either. You are of the opinion that we should have newspapers that are only headlines, something easier to digest, but void of content.
> Google feeds the publishers, not the other way around. A significant portion of their traffic comes directly from Google. The other way around simply doesn't happen.
What do you think Google's business model is? They don't generate any content after all. Do you think they are losing money on search or news?
Imagine a world where no one would want Google to index their websites, just because. The world wide web would continue working, but Google would eventually disappear, because they do not create any content themselves.
Isn't it what TikTok is doing? Short form content is huge and exploding on YouTube and Instagram.
That doesn't make it any better than either of them.
You are conflating two things, needs and business. People need to be informed, and how informed a society is cannot be measured as the success of the platforms participating in that.
News articles are supposed to be informative, yes, but most are not informative about something that is of value to the readers life.
It used to be that browsing the headlines was enough to see if an article was relevant to the reader, but with click-bait I now need a summary for that - on HN I check the comments first, and then I read the article only if it gets referred to as good or insightful.
On social media I cannot rely on the comments, so I need a summary.
If the vast majority of articles weren't relevant enough for people to read them, there would not be any interest in publishing the headlines in the first place.
The fact that Google is actually trying to fight this law, instead of just removing the links, is proof that they do find them monetizable.
Not if the majority of the value resides in the headline.
It's telling that, from the point of view of the government, Google and the media companies, the summary and the link to an article are worth more than the article itself.
So you are telling me that Google is profiting from publishing content that is not theirs, without giving anything back in return? Because that's absolutely my point.
There's a difference (and this has been tested in court). Links aren't content from a legal perspective.
Also, it's not that links aren't content from a legal perspective, there's a lot going on there, but that they are opt-out content, meaning that one could just decide not to allow any search engine or aggregator to automatically index their contents. It is also different from personal aggregators, which is why you could do it yourself.
Isn't the argument just that when users post links to news stories on Facebook, the feed will grab the headline and first paragraph as a "link preview"? I don't think it's summarizing anything from multiple sites.
Again, the issue is that most people only read the headlines [0], which is exacerbated by platforms publishing tirades of them and nothing else.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/03/19/am...
With a conventional definition of broadcasting, a radio show (that broadly transmits on the scarce, finite, government-allocated spectrum) would be beholden to include some Canadian culture in programming, and pay Canadian creators through licensing deals.
Where we are now, Canadian media has been granted another moat as their competitiveness continues to wane (so far, only video game production remains healthy and competitive with the world without this style of protectionism). CBC, The Toronto Star, etc cannot hope to compete with the global appeal of The New York Times, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc, so they’re demanding they be made artificially competitive online through boosted presence in online spaces, and paid royalties from that arrangement.
If they invested half the energy spent on trying to erect protective barriers on innovating and developing a better product they likely wouldn't be in this predicament.
Alot easier said than done, I know. With the spate of new media failures recently (Buzzfeed and Vice), maybe this is just a really tough nut to crack.
Most of what Celine Dion produced in her career doesn't fit the government approved list of cultural content, so is considered foreign music. But some recordings from Elvis do count because he recorded them on Canadian soil during a tour.
this is basically the entirety of Canadian culture at this point.
there isn't anything meaningfully different from the US, so they have to double down on 'the woke' to try to differentiate. the result is a few gems, a lot of dross, and non-stop virtue signaling.
He explained to me that under Canadian law, absolutely none of that is Canadian Content or Culture. No subsidies, no quotas. Even a Denis Villeneuve movie isn't either.
He explained to me that to watch original content in French he has to VPN in Canada to be allowed to watch content that's only produced in Canada for French Canadians; they won't even make the smallest attempt at exporting it.
Honestly the whole concept, to me, is bizarre.
This bill would have Meta paying money to news sites for links the news sites themselves post on Facebook! It’s completely backwards! The news sites should be paying Facebook to advertise on their platform!
Not that I’m a big fan of Facebook or anything. But it’s totally understandable to me that Facebook would ban all links to Canadian news sites if this bill passes. It represents unlimited liability for them!
This law seems more about negotiating how much of the pie each part gets.
Of course removing news could also make it a nicer place to be, so maybe it'll increase user engagement. Who knows.
I also pretty thoroughly detest most of the news media in Canada. It's become far too politicized, and it strictly presents one side of the political spectrum but not in a good way. It tries to take some pretty radical ideas and normalize them, trying to pass them off as mainstream.
It also happens to be pretty uncritical of the big media corporations in Canada, not wanting to bite the hand that feeds it. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that Canadians pay some of the highest rates in the world for wireless and internet access.
The warnings about C-11 are not because of FUD.