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.
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.
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...