Google offers cash support to Europe's news groups | Hacker News Reader

Google offers cash support to Europe's news groups

bbc.co.uk

55 pointstpatke19 comments

This is terrible. So Google is trying to get out of the monopoly accusations by bribing the mainstream media. They will make a deal and Google will get its monopole, and the media too.

I don't know if anyone here heard about the "Google tax" in Spain [1], but here are my worst fears: Google will consolidate its monopole, and the mainstream press too.

Here's how it went in Spain. One could go to Google News to get a glance of the news. One could find mainstream press there, international or otherwise, alongside with independent media and bloggers.

So the government in Spain (or, actually, the media lobby?) creates a law tailored to tax Google, and Google just cancels the service. How did that turn out?

People go now directly to the mainstream media sites, and independent media are now completely out of the game. Mainstream papers lost some readers, but made the competency almost invisible in the process.

If this trend goes on, and Google and the mainstream media make "peace deals", it means the same big players as always will get a monopoly on Google services, while Google will secure popular contents for their own services (Google News, Android News widgets, and so on).

We all lose in media plurality and independence. In the future we will be worse informed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_tax

Yes, they (Google) basically paid them off.

What's interesting is that I don't see Bild in the list of newspapers backing this, and the word is that one of the main entities fighting against Google is Axel Springer, Bild's publisher, which has enormous influence on German politicians. And, as it happens, right now German politicians have quite a big influence on what what gets decided in Brussels.

Anyway, IMHO the traditional printed press is fighting a losing battle, not against Google, but against technological change, and they kind of know it, at least the smart guys among them have started to realize that. Long term they cannot realistically compete against the likes of Buzzfeed, Twitter statuses, YT videos and targeted sub-reddits. For example and despite all its faults, /r/syriancivilwar is miles ahead of traditional media when it comes to reporting on the ongoing Syrian Civil War.

> but against technological change, and they kind of know it

Absolutely correct, they're well aware of it. They're only wrong on the approach: let's just pretend Internet is like printed media and try to shoehorn our business model on this new medium.

> Long term they cannot realistically compete against the likes of Buzzfeed, Twitter statuses, YT videos and targeted sub-reddits.

I think you're wrong. And apparently Google does too, otherwise it wouldn't be paying-to-play.

Yes, those publishers have an uphill battle, no doubt. However short, meaningless articles that just try to be there first won't be the path to success. Of course, Twitter, reddit and others are miles ahead when it comes to reporting things first. The problem is that many outlets still try to package what could easily be one liners or 2 bullet points into whole articles. These things barely have the substance of half a headline. There simply isn't much value in this kind of reporting.

Where they actually could make a difference is longform reports - the kind of articles The New Yorker and others are famous for. Connecting the dots and painting the big picture with lots of details - and reporting in time isn't an issue here. For these stories it's probably recommended to take more time, extensive investigation and some distance to reflect on early assumptions and speculation. This is something that still can't be easily done by just anyone.

The days of needing two dozen tabloids daily at the newsstand are gone and there's no need to save them.

I don't see how this is Google's fault - we had a similar situation with the "Leistungsschutzrecht" in Germany and of course Google would be insane to pay for aggregating news snippets and leading readers to media outlets.

It's a silly regulation, a quick approach to re-gain lost profits for the media corporations. The fact that those companies were able to talk the government into passing this law is rather ridiculous in my opinion.

That's exactly it, it's the large media companies that pressure the government into bullying Google the ones to blame for the situation we're headed.

While it's true that it's not their fault, it's a shame that they've folded to the pressures of the media lobby.

But I don't blame them, business is business. You can't just let the major content creators go to the competence, even if they're massive asshats.

Well, at least here in Germany Google required publishers to waive their right to be paid or Google just wouldn't index their content in the news section (search wasn't affected at all). And in my mind, rightly so, a brilliant move. Of course all those publishers gave in since you obviously can't force Google to pay for content (snippets of it!) it actually doesn't need/want all that badly, while publishers on the other hand really, really wanted to be indexed.

This recent development is probably more of an answer to the EU monopoly investigation, where Google tries to show that they can behave.

Anyone else think of usenet when they saw the headline?

I did, and for a brief beautiful moment I thought usenet would become mainstream again (and google groups would magically disappear).

Yep. I was really disappointed.

Yes. Like that's gonna happen.

Note that Murdoch is listed as not participating in this.

News barely makes any money. The only people that have made it pay directly are low-latency financial services: Thompson-Reuters and Bloomberg.

This makes it absolutely rife with people buying their way to influence. Rupert Murdoch is the big example, but the Telegraph is currently imploding under this pressure as well (owned by Barclay brothers, cancelling articles unfavourable to HSBC).

"Google bribes European news groups".

News groups bribe European law-makers, European law-makers put the thumb screws to Google, Google covers the cost of the bribes originally made by the news groups to loosen the screws.

It's a pretty solid business model on the news groups' part.

Edit: Meh, this is clearly an unfounded conspiracy theory, so I won't stand behind it. But the laws are fairly confusing when looking at the facts, which causes me to grab onto any explanation that I can make sense of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baksheesh

to be fair, this seems a still tiny selection, i.e. Les Echos (FR), FAZ & Die Zeit (DE), Financial Times&The Guardian (UK), NRC Media (NL), El Pais (ES), La Stampa (IT).

As long as this is not an exclusive/restrictive agreement I don't think it's bad.

Well, at least that kills any argument of Google just being an unbiased aggregator.

Bloody hell, there have been military coups that have tried to take control of the media in more subtle ways than this...

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