German Government Wants Google To Pay For the Right To Link To News Sites

The day before yesterday I would have thought that the German government was being stupid, of course you shouldn't make search engines pay for this.

But yesterday I read Trust Me, I'm Lying and learned how much incentives matter. When the news media competes based on their established brand - people seek you out because they know you are good - you have an incentive to produce high quality content. By contrast when people seek you out because your titles and teasers are compelling - as happens when people find you through a search engine - then your incentive is to generate the most compelling lead-in to useless content. You have no incentives to do mundane things like check facts.

The result of per paper sales over a hundred years ago was the "yellow press". Today it is blog spam. If Germany can encourage better incentives, the result will be a better served public.

I don't know the details of the bill. I don't know if it could successfully accomplish anything like that. But discouraging business models that depend on blogspam is not a bad thing for our world.