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Comment by setgree | Hacker News Reader

This threat is credible: Google shut off Spain's access to Google News for eight years for similar reasons [0].

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-news-re-opens-spai...

They reopened in Spain now that they can _"reach individual or group agreements with publishers"_, which makes sense if you believe that asking the publisher before summarizing their content is the right thing to do.

Meanwhile in Canada...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/29/google-ca...

Although facebook/insta did refuse to be blackmailed, and many canadian news orgs are actually harmed by this sort of bullshit link taxing because their media can't be shared on facebook anymore, where a lot of older news watchers get their news

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availabili...

So essentially Canada gets to subsidize news outlets by having Google pay for them as a yearly subscription.

No link tax, just a tax for news.

Sounds... reasonable?

Google and Meta had each been funding journalism — actual journalism, not vulture capital clickbait — voluntarily, which they are now not. Google is now paying $100m, most of which goes to huge corporations. Meta pulled out altogether, slashing traffic to canadian media sites by half.

How were Meta and Google funding "actual" journalism vs. clickbait? Do you have any sources on that?

Google offered News Showcase, where they paid participating orgs for quality content curated by professional editors. They were paying $25 million a year to Canadian journalists. That program is now not available in Canada. Facebook had a similar program of the same scale that they also pulled.

This tax applies only to Google. It doesn't apply to any other tech company, and it never will. The DMA at least provides more-or-less objective criteria for what constitutes a "gatekeeper", but this is literally a private deal between Canada and Google.

I don't have a problem with publishers getting a greater share of ad revenue, but there are better ways to do it. The govt could increase taxes on ad exchanges categorically (still effectively a tax on Google and Facebook) and give publishers tax breaks. That would have the same effect but be way more reasonable.

It applied to Facebook/Meta and any larger social media sites. Meta just shut it down and any direct contributions to journalism that they were making, and now the publishers are crying because their traffic has plummetted, to the surprise of precisely nobody except them.

Not sure where you're getting your information.

The proposed California law applies only to sites with 1 billion MAU and sales or market cap over $550 billion. It only applies to Alphabet and Meta.

I'm talking about the Guardian article in the grandparent comment. It's a private deal between Google and the Canadian govt.

There is no such thing as a private deal with the government that is extorting you for money to give to legacy media companies.

It's like calling armed robbery by a cop under official orders by the president a private deal. Not a thing.

It's not healthy for news outlets to depend on being subsidized. Or, more accurately: it's not healthy for every news outlet to be subsidized by the same source, especially in this sorta roundabout way that can be pulled out from under them with a single decision by Google. If I've come to one conclusion about professional news in the last 25 years, it's that they need to control their source of revenue and not depend on being a vassal of big tech. Our ability to get quality journalism shouldn't require a FAANG company to provide the necessary resources; not distribution, not editorial, not financial.

so, get of Facebook already and go to the news sites?

That sounds like the threat isn't credible because they came back.

They came back after the law was repealed.

Citation? I'm not seeing that anywhere.

What sources are you looking at?

I'm not playing this game. I'm not claiming that the law was or wasn't repealed; I don't know. You're the one making the claim that it was repealed. Cite a source or you're just making things up.

You saying "I'm not seeing that anywhere" assumes you made the effort to look. People aren't going to do the homework for you. I don't have anything to prove. Google it and click the first result.

> You saying "I'm not seeing that anywhere" assumes you made the effort to look.

I did, and it's not a good faith argument to claim otherwise.

> People aren't going to do the homework for you.

You're the one making the claim. It's your homework, not mine.

> I don't have anything to prove.

You made a claim, so it is in fact yours to prove.

Given your refusal to back up your claim, it's beginning to look like you are just lying.

EDIT: I am seeing that there was an adoption of an EU regulation which modified the law, not repealed it, which is pretty different from the claim you're making[1]:

> BRUSSELS, June 22 (Reuters) - Alphabet (GOOGL.O) , opens new tab reopened Google News in Spain on Wednesday, eight years after it shut down the service because of a Spanish rule forcing the company and other news aggregators to pay publishers for using snippets of their news.

> Madrid last year transposed European Union copyright rules, revamped in 2020, into legislation, allowing media outlets to negotiate directly with the tech giant.

To be clear: Google is still required to pay publishers in Spain: the change is that the price is negotiable.

So, it's becoming clear now why you refused to link a source: because you are wrong. And since now I am making a claim, I'm linking it:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-news-re-opens-spai...

You know, the link upthread.

They didn't repeal it, they modified it.

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