Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say | Hacker News Reader

Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say

9to5google.com

56 pointsironyman63 comments

Maybe off topic, but Ive always found strange people who comment on Google's monopoly by focusing on chrome. It seems obvious to me that the key to their dominance is that they both have control over how traffic is distributed to websites, and how those websites get paid for the traffic they get. Chrome and android are just nice to haves, but Google would still be a monopoly without them.

I think if you wanna break up Google it would be a lot more effective to separate search from AdSense, rather than chrome.

Also Chrome is basically useless as a money-making product without the google integrations. There's no way to monetize it without search and ad integrations.

Apple gets paid $20 billion per year to set Google as the default search engine in Safari...

Yeah and if you’re going by market share that easily puts Chrome in the $100billion range.

Obviously there are massive profits to be made from private browsers.

50million chromeOS new devices are sold and added to its userbase. Chrome as a company could be huge and compete against Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Google sells chrome(os) directly as a product to enterprises and schools for fleet management and addon functions. Its currently part of google workspace but could be separated out.

Is going to print money like google ads? Probably not. Could it sustain the browser as a standalone business? Perhaps.

So does x, so does youtube, so does tiktok, so does instagram. It's not unique for an app to control both discovery and monetization of content within it.

"Chrome and android are just nice to haves, but Google would still be a monopoly without them."

Being a monopoly is not unlawful.

"... the possession of monopoly power will not be found unlawful unless it is accompanied by an element of anticompetitive conduct."

https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/131153/verizon-communi...

Google's anticompetitive conduct occurred mainly through agreements concerning web browser defaults.

Controlling default settings in web browsers via these agreements will be prohibited. It stands to reason that controlling default settings by distributing its own web browser will, too.

"Maybe off topic, but Ive always found strange people who comment on Google's monopoly by focusing on chrome."

As such, it is not strange that proposed remedies targeting Chrome were submitted and have been a focus of online commentary.

IP laws will never be enforced on LLMs because they cannot be enforced on Chinese open source LLMs.

Western governments would rather publishers lose some property rights than tolerate a world where their industries become dependent on Chinese LLMs. Although to be clear, they probably don’t enjoy either option.

Workplace safety, environmental protection and human rights laws will never be enforced in the manufacturing industry because they cannot be enforced on the Chinese manufacturing industry.

Western governments would rather citizens lose some rights and years off their life than tolerate a world where their industries become dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

————

Western governments could make models trained on stolen IP toxic if they wanted.

It may not be worth it. The trade off of model capability vs the value of IP law might be worthwhile.

But western governments should show a little dignity and openly make that trade off. We don’t need to appeal to “but China”.

Western governments were willing to give up their manufacturers sectors, or at least large parts of them, to maintain better environmental/labour laws than China.

It’s not clear that was a good decision, but tariffs and similar restrictions at least provide hope of a remedy. But we can’t use tariffs on open source software.

>Western governments were willing to give up their manufacturers sectors, or at least large parts of them, to maintain better environmental/labour laws than China.

Their motivation wasn't the maintenance of better environmental and labor laws, but higher profits from exploiting China's more business friendly (less regulation, fewer labor rights) environment. Had it been economically and politically viable for Western governments to domestically enact the same environmental and labor standards as China, they would have done so. And as soon as the quality of life in China improved enough that labor there was no longer economically viable, many companies moved their outsourcing elsewhere, such as to Vietnam or Africa.

It's definitely not fair, but publishers were already driving away users with screens full of ads, newsletter pop ups, "affiliate" links, and padded-out content (so people scroll more and see more ads). Users aren't going to shed any tears for them.

The AI results are also going to be filled with that kind of trash if they aren't already.

People have been claiming AI text will be filled with ads since long before ChatGPT, and I'm sure they'll continue to await it for years to come.

Indeed, even the OpenAI CFO continues to actively await them.

> Sarah Friar, chief financial officer at OpenAI, told the Financial Times in an interview that the $150bn AI start-up was weighing up an ads model, adding that it planned to be “thoughtful about when and where we implement them [ads]”.

https://www.ft.com/content/9350d075-1658-4d3c-8bc9-b9b3dfc29...

https://archive.ph/GlE3F

When the quality content continues to disappear, then they will care - and it will be too late.

We’re talking Future Publishing or even NYT here…

NYT dying because of moderate changes to Google search is a gigantic slippery-slope argument, and would be such a slow process that there'd be plenty of time to pivot anyway.

As a point of interest, New York Times quarterly profit is up 22% from a year ago. 250,000 new subscribers in the quarter.

11.6 million subscribers. 600,000 of them get the dead tree edition.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/business/media/new-york-t...

There will have to be a new IP framework to make sure people are properly incentivized to produce content in an AI first world.

The "traffic" did not incentivize "publishers" (as they call themselves) to produce any valuable content.. instead, it incentivized them to produce SEO garbage that's not helpful and often deceptive.

I think it's worth being thoughtful about the whole range of folks doing a whole range of stuff out on the Internet. I like this piece about the various incentives that exist: https://vbuckenham.com/blog/how-to-find-things-online/

I don't know how your comment addresses my comment and the article you mentioned is long. But since you replied, you know what you meant, so could you share your particular argument?

I think connecting this to what V expressed is the value I meant to add here, I think they expressed what they meant with the detail required to express it, and I'm not interested in engaging with the topic on a level that works from summaries alone. Suffice to say that you responded to a comment speaking of how "people are properly incentivized to produce content" by saying '"traffic" did not incentivize "publishers" (as they call themselves) to produce any valuable content' as though traffic didn't have to do with the people out there publishing valuable stuff on the internet today, or as though such people don't exist. V's thing considers the interaction among these people, their incentives, and LLMs.

> as though traffic didn't have to do with the people out there publishing valuable stuff on the internet today, or as though such people don't exist

Even if there are people, today, that do publish valuable stuff on the internet only because (or thanks to) the expected traffic (either own ads or selling ad space), I claim that without that traffic, there will be others who will be publishing valuable stuff, and the traffic incentivized garbage more than the valuable stuff.

Finally, if that's not the case, then in order for the LLM to be useful, it needs valuable training data. So this problem solves itself - competitive LLM company will need to pay for the data directly, and for me, that model incentivizes valuable stuff more than garbage.

If it’s easy enough to produce creative “content” thanks to AI, and people have enough money and free time, they’ll create without being paid (for themselves, social status, social influence, scientific advancement, etc.)

In the meantime, I think people should focus on attribution, and algorithms to find related work (which may suitably substitute for the former). This will allow us to fund creators and publishers for AI output, maybe by forcing the AI companies, or naturally through patronage (see AI output you like, find who owns the training data that contributed to it, donate to them). Moreover, it will help people discover more interesting things and creators.

The LLM should know when it regurgitates content from a specific site and page, that should be the new “pageview”. Me telling the LLM that I don’t want the first answer it gave me from a common site is the same as me going deep into Google search result page 10 (like the old days).

> LLM should know when it regurgitates content from a specific site and page

I dont think that's how LLMs work.

Maybe some reverse attribution to determine how much credit to give different sources in the old top k results. Maybe a llm that is trained on fact finding, and giving proper % of credit. But this would probably require a collective contract in place to benefit site owners, which means its never going to happen.

That's what Google does now for some of its AI search results. There's a link icon next to some of the answers.

No, you have it backwards. What google does is have it's ai read the URLs that search found, summarize them, and tag the URL.

You don’t think it can run one more iteration on its own output to provide attribution? They could even create a synthetic page view for the sources with an exclusive bot and not change anything about how things are done (the bot is told to visit the site registering a page view).

> You don’t think it can run one more iteration on its own output to provide attribution

Please explain to me how an algorithm that takes a sequence of tokens and outputs a URL would work.

IP is such a stupid concept. Both humans and AI use material to improve themselves and that material is often heavily gatekept (Try getting access to a "regular" scientific paper) and should be freely accessible to anyone. No matter who.

I tend to agree with you, but without a structure to incentivize people to produce such material, less of it will be created. If people can't pay the bills by doing research or writing, far fewer people will do it.

I somewhat agree with you. At the same time, the effort involved in creating valuable IP can vary drastically from something I throw together on my phone like a paragraph of writing to a full movie production or huge investment in drug design for helping people live longer.

Because of the variance in production cost and ROI for effort, vs the general ability to copy IP (just the IP, which could be loads of research that isn’t valuable without loads of capital and decades of investment into certain infrastructure e.g. TSMC), there have to be some sort of incentives to do the hard groundwork that creates valuable IP that once discovered is trivial to copy or implement, otherwise people simply won’t do it, they’ll just copy and resell and then fewer people will do the initial leg work until we’re left chasing the bottom of the barrel of the level of effort someone may invest in something they have no means of capturing return from that work and risk. And not everything can be hidden behind a web service, some IP is far more challenging to protect.

So, while I tend to agree that the current implementation of IP protections is trash, I think we do need something there to encourage such work. In research we have(/had?) federal tax investment into doing such work and as a trade off, researchers get fed and live a semi comfortable or sometime decent quality of life for their efforts. I don’t have the answers to the ideal model, I know what we have isn’t great and can be improved upon in some ways, but I don’t know wha the best(TM) solution is here. I know it’s not pure unrestricted markets doing whatever they want, though.

> IP is such a stupid concept. Both humans and AI use material to improve themselves and that material is often heavily gatekept (Try getting access to a "regular" scientific paper) and should be freely accessible to anyone. No matter who.

It's not a stupid concept. It exists because someone put effort in. Should we steal their effort?

I put in effort to brush my teeth every day. Everyone who sees my smile is stealing that effort and should be required to pay me.

This is a pretty broken analogy. You brush your teeth to look after them. People who see your smile don't reverse any of that cleaning effect.

With scientific research especially the gate keeping is insanely counter-productive.

Imagine if Wikipedia had a paywall for each article… but you had to pay to a different organisation for each vaguely related set of pages. Some requiring recurring subscriptions and minimum spend so you can’t cancel.

Worse, the people demanding the payment aren’t even the operators of Wikipedia and they charge the article editors for the privilege of publishing on their platform!

You can have government funded research at a government funded university and then both the researcher and the students at that same university have to pay to have the research published and accessed!

But not too many pictures please and they can’t have color, that’s expensive, you see?

Raw data hosting? No way! Do that yourself.

Versioning, backlinks, ongoing feedback, comments, etc… don’t even ask! Do you think this is the future!?

Meanwhile the largest collaboration of human minds on the planet takes place on GitHub and is almost entirely volunteers working for free and giving away their work for free for everyone to fork and build on. And comment, contribute, and extend.

Science as it is today is a tyre fire and it is almost entirely the fault of rent seeking middlemen with misaligned incentives.

If scientists want to be volunteers and publish openly, that can happen today. Nothing stops them. That's the Wikipedia model, is it not?

The institutions that they work for have been thoroughly bribed to make that difficult. You can't get tenure unless you publish in a "reputable" paper, for example.

For IT people, the rough equivalent is why a 1 KB file costs $50/year despite containing not much more than a random number and a text field verified with a single API call.

Sure, you can have a HTTPS certificate for free! You can!

Just not through Azure Key Vault CA automation, because Let's Encrypt couldn't afford the kick-back to a middle manager in Redmond. Or more charitably, because "there's no margin on free".

Never underestimate the ability and willingness of billions of managers to insert themselves into the middle and collect rent on everybody below them.

If they're working for institutions then that's not the same as volunteering for Wikipedia. Wikipedia is staffed by volunteers.

I'm replying to a comment that negatively compares science publishing to Wikipedia. What stops a scientist publishing work voluntarily on a free platform?

I think the right way to understand it is as a kind of theft of service.

Somebody does something which takes some work. There's nothing special about his work other than that it is available-- there's so many stories you can tell, there's so many ways to express an idea, that to, if the author hadn't created a particular work, making it illegal to create that particular work, people wouldn't have lost anything. It would be a trivial restriction.

Thus when someone takes a particular work and does something with it, he chooses to not develop one of the other similar works he himself could have created, and takes advantage of somebody else's effort.

Is there much material difference to publishers to opt out of AI Mode given how much of the distribution Google controls?

I understand it prevents publishers' works from being "stolen" but leaves them without a major distribution source.

Elevator Operators (people who were driving elevators up and down) also got their job "stolen" by AI.

Was it the responsibility of the people who created automated, cheaper and better elevators to defend the job of these obsolete people ?

Not really.

The big question is whether Google followed the content licensing, and if needed, paid for it.

I'm sure they did not, but the rich guys win, even if they do something truly illegal.

If they would have respected the laws, OpenAI would not have been able to create AI models at all (as they are derivatives of copyrighted works).

So it's pure piracy of content at scale. The same with Veo3.

Is it beneficial to humanity ? Probably yes.

Is it harmful to content creators ? Absolutely but in the long-term, they have little chances to survive, no matter if legal or not, because this is both what the market and consumers want.

For example, these people on Fiverr selling blog posts, it was minimum 200 USD per blog post, and few days of turnaround.

Now with AI it's 0.01 USD and instant.

It is difficult to say this is what consumers want, when right now consumers are getting the best of both worlds: The ease of AI agents without the long-term negative consequences of destroying the publishers who created all the high quality training data in the first place.

I think in the long term the highest quality content creators are going to find ways to keep their information out of AI training data, and put it behind walled gardens.

They could have stuck to works that are in public domain.

are you the same guy that gives free coffee to the crooked county sheriffs on their way to take most of a year's harvest on the basis of fake laws?

Leaving outside the ethical part of it - which is huge, this kills innovation.

The problem I see is that when everything is iterative, and you kill sustainable incentives for new views, innovation disappears.

Is like the movies. We will get all budget towards remakes and reboots, and little new would show up.

Being an 80s guy, I remember many new movies coming out every year, and when they stretched beyond 2 or 3 films, people frowned.

Back to the future, Indy (the good years), Rambo (first 3), lethal weapon. Cool gems came up too (Last action hero?Terminator) even in loaded fields like simple action movies…. Star Wars, 3 films. Matrix. bond was the exception.

Now? mission impossible (8 films at over 2h), fast and mediocre franchise (20 movies), Marvel and DC movies (3 movies shot 30 different times), and everything else is a reboot. Almost impossible for new ideas to get through.

We are killing culture, innovation and human spark for some companies to make a billion more. We are feeding like factory pigs from generic slop, and as the factories grow they kill fertile ground for those who wanted to eat something cleaner.

The fact that is happening does not mean it’s right. It’s just we are accepting mediocrity as our guiding principle at 0.01 USD a pop…

What a weird analogy.

The content and services provided by AI still needs those humans behind. Maybe when it’s all AI agents talking to themselves, this would make sense, but before that, someone has to write, edit and choose that content.

How can you say publishers are obsolete ?

Then let's get rid of all IP. I am sure Google is happy ripping other people's contents but they will vigorously defend their own IP. I also wouldn't call content creators "obsolete". AI would have nothing to train on without them.

It is impossible to do things like journalism through AI.

And no one expects a "free job"; they just expect their work to not be used in ways that doesn't benefit them at all (but instead benefits someone else).

The bizarre analogies AI maximalists are pushing are boring and tedious to the point of bad faith.

But what do I know ... I'm just an "obsolete person" shrug

Ben Thompson's latest article deals with a possible solution to this issue: https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-si...

Tl;dr* He claims ads were the original sin of the web, built for a human internet. For the coming agentic web where most browsing would be done by agents, he proposes a new protocol that has payments integrated into it. Specifically agents paying for accessing content using micropayments with stablecoins.

Also interesting to note that this is one of the most submitted articles of Stratechery to HN but gained no traction. Latest submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44073241

* A summary can also be found here: https://stratechery.com/2025/the-upheaval-coming-for-the-int...

People have been predicting micropayments replacing ads (with differing technology implementations) for decades at this point and it's never come to fruition, so is unlikely to be taken seriously now either.

Tying it to cryptocurrency just seems like it's even less likely to get your regular Joe to onboard to this scheme, so I can see why it's never gained wider interest.

The difference here is that humans aren't the ones using the stablecoins or micropayments. Agents are. Humans will interact with agents like they currently do.

Honestly, some form of digital credits work just as well here IMO (barring regulatory hurdles). No crypto necessary.

Very good. Google created this SEO garbage so now they can (and should) put an end to it.

harm to the publishing industry is the worlds tiniest violin and biggest eyeroll. google is evil in much bigger ways than this.

Fix the insanity that is intellectual property and get back to us.

Google is really making a good case that they're abusing their monopoly positino and need trust busting.

Is there a difference from what Google is doing here and what other players (OpenAI, Perplexity, Phind…) are doing?

Google will give them more money if they win the lawsuit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com