Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

When you owe someone 10'000 Eur you have a problem.

When you owe someone 1 Billion Euro, they have a problem.

With the european regulation protecting interstate commerce, the Double Irish even with a Dutch Sandwich seems legally fine. It will take multiple lawsuits to try to do anything against it.

Note to north american readers- there's a huge political effort in europe, instrumented by the french and german government, to create a new kind of copyright for indexing new articles, ie arrange a special tax scheme to divert money from search engines to the european media companies.

It's just yet another case of entitlement from companies whose business models have mostly been made obsolete.

So this news seems to be just part of the smear campaign, maybe to put more bargaining chips on the table and strongarm google into accepting this. The lows in google stock also frequently made the news these last few weeks - it's more than a coincidence when you consider the emerging difference between french/german newspapers and other news sources on this same fact, and who owns the newspaper.

Good luck to France- she will need it to pull something out of so many shenanigans.

(But deep inside me, I'd love to see the negotiations break, with google removing all french newspaper from google news and see how long the european media companies will last before giving up in their stupid demands while other french-language news source eat their cake - from Quebec or North Africa. That would send the right message to the government - stop messing with the economy)

You're conflating two entirely different issues here (though you're not alone in that, the French government itself is likely to play one issue as a leverage to the other).

The French newspapers that are whining about google indexing their content, are already heavily subsidized by the government and have missed every conceivable opportunity to offer something worthwhile online or on dead paper. There are a handful of very vocal op-eds who keep advocating censoring or curating the internet, coming from the hurtful realization that anybody can express its not so special opinion on the internet - thus levelling the field (in France, like in most places I suspect, celebrity journalists mostly offer vapid copycat opinions).

So, I agree, they're despicable.

Now, there's an entirely different issue: how big companies can get away not paying taxes. This is what this news item is about.

You're right, they are different issues.

It's just the timing of bring such issues to the attention of the public that seems suspect to me - especially after I noticed how the downs in google stock suddenly became newsworthy.

IMHO, it's not a coincidence.

You're right it's not, and that's what makes it infuriating since both Google and the French government storytelling benefit from lumping these issues together ("look at ze seellee control-freaks French" vs. "we raise high the light of Justice and Equality for Humanity as a whole").

That's conspiracy theory logic. The tax issue has been bothering multiple governments, and many non-European media companies have problems with the news aggregation. Google is a very large entity, just because it is challenged on two different fronts does not mean that there's a coordinated assault.

You know the saying - once is bad luck, twice is a coincidence, thrice is usually an enemy action.

I see the google news strongarm with france and germany, the tax issues with other european countries, the reports about the stock lows in the french press, anger against youtube allowing the diffusion of anti-religion movies - with protests in the uk and continental politicians explaining it is hurting sensibilities - it just seems more than pure randomness to me.

I make a judgement call. Call that conspiracy theory if you prefer.

Maybe google is just a very large entity, but it's a) profitable, b) non european and c) advocating free speech, which makes it a good target for populist european politicians.

A hole in your theory is that France is among the least tolerant European countries as far as Islam is concerned. Head-to-toe Islamic garments for women are forbidden by law, for example. So I don;t think they'd be bent out of shape about an inflammatory video on YouTube to the extent of wanting to punish Google; any more than they were bent out of shape about French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo publishing cartoons of Mohammad at the same time. As for the stock lows, that was worldwide news in the financial press because it surprised everyone.

I wouldn't call that a hole, considering that between 85% to 93% of muslims voted for Hollande (depending on which polls you prefer to take), the current president of France.

It makes even more sense if you remember that these laws were mostly supported by the previous government.

Charlie Hebdo is certainly a leftist satirical magazine, but you should know that polls showed around 47% of the population considered it should not have published of Mohammad cartoons - even AFTER it was firebombed, death threat were issued and several arrested.

In the end, this is IMHO a good move by Hollande in realpolitik : show to those who care about you that you care about them too. Even better if you can claim it's about "increasing tolerance".

I gave you +1 for middle brow dismissal.

Of course it's not a coincidence. Eric Schmidt met the president of France. They don't meet every other day, so it's normal for them to talk about various issues at once.

To be fair, the article itself mentioned both of those issues together, and I think they are related simply because they're both chips on the same poker table.

As Putin and the Chinese have so deftly showed, you control a country's major media, you control the country. There is a lot of political power bottled up in the news monopolies that Google is disrupting so it would be natural for the people who rely on that power in the government to act to protect it.

E. Schmidt meeting Hollande, France's president, is therefore quite interesting.

The production of news content -- like aid to the destitute or the military -- might be an obsolete business model but is still an essential social good worth protecting.

says who?

Production of news content is happening without the news papers. It is happening without taxing Google 1 billion Euros.

Who says it is outdated? Do you have stats on that? I get more news content now than ever before. There clearly must be money in it, or enough that people haven't stopped producing content.

Also, who says it is a societal good that we must protect? If society no longer values news and refuses to pay for it, who are you to decide we still should?

There will always be demand for news, it just depends on where the demand is.

Just because we don't want newspapers subsidized by the government doesn't mean we don't value news content. This is a fallacy that statists have been making for centuries-- you're confusing the values of society with the values of government.

The issue is that without the state to subsidizing it and if the content is freely available through other intermediary companies, then there is no apparent way to cover the costs of media production.

When you write what appears to be "I think all currently viable options for funding serious news production are inappropriate", then it doesn't sound like you value news content. That is honestly an attempt to not strawman you, just a (perhaps confused) understanding of your seemingly untenable position. If an alternative to state funding is viable while still allowing free aggregation and distribution by arbitrary third parties, I am definitely interested in it.

Then don't make it freely available. If your content is so valuable, paywall it.

You wrote 10 words, but I'm going to reply with a wall of text anyway. I believe the value being discussed above is the value to society of having a well educated populace, which is notably different than the perceived economic value to any individual; the main justification for taxes existing in any form is that there are many cases where people spending their money without intelligent self interest is for the best interest of everyone, including themselves (it's trivial to show how this can be true, see the prisoners dillema).

Having an educated populace has enough value that we have public schools; I don't see how informing adults is any different.

Note that I think there are also a ton of unrelated recent societal changes that make it not economically feasible for the news to be behind a paywall; notably that recent shifts that have dramatically reduced cost of publishing and aggregating have made it extremely easy to republish other journalists work trivially. All you need to do is have a subscription to the NYT paywall and one guy getting paid shit to reword their articles; to any other user they will choose the free content that has the same core information that the other site could never have afforded paying for investigative journalism. Patents on reporting facts are obviously untenable, so I see no real option other than the state supporting the media.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com