There is no love lost between me and Google, but then I have zero regard for "news" organizations that are attempting to strong-arm funds from Google for their failing business model.
100%. I can't think of a less empathetic beneficiary of this bill than Chatham Asset Management and the other vulture firms that are overseeing the destruction of the news business.
I agree with this sentiment 100%. They've (diff news orgs and gov'ts) tried this tactic elsewhere and they have failed, but there still are folks who think if they try again, this time they will be lucky or they can find a sympathetic ear in the gov't to do the dirty work for them.
is it news orgs or governments? News orgs can't enact taxes without co-opting governments to pass laws.
But I agree these link taxes are a fundamentally broken concept where legacy media looks to strongarm funds out of others for sharing their publicly shared news.
The whole thing smells like wealth distribution ("hmm, the journalism industry is struggling, but the tech industry is booming. The tech industry interacts with the journalism industry, maybe we can help the journalism industry by mandating a new wealth gradient flowing from one to support the other?")
I’m very pro capitalism but I do think redistribution makes sense in the context of giant corporations that are effectively immune to competition. Why do you think Google and Amazon and others can create entire products that never make a profit for years and then unceremoniously shut them down or reduce their investments in them? Everyone else has to try to survive based on their merits and actually make money. Platform owners can be very abusive because those dependent on the platform can have no choice and no voice to speak up. We see this everywhere - whether it is Amazon’s abuse of third party sellers or Google’s abuse of content creators (including news) or Apple’s abuse of app developers. We don’t need to craft a bunch of very targeted laws to reign this in - we just need to split them up and tax any company with market cap above $500B heavily.
> Why do you think Google and Amazon and others can create entire products that never make a profit for years and then unceremoniously shut them down or reduce their investments in them?
It seems like Google and Amazon shutting down or divesting some products would make room for a lot of competitors to step in and dominate that space.
Maybe, but a lot of the would-be companies often get starved of revenue and die before the big companies exit. Until then, the big companies are often giving things away for free, or at a loss, or bundling them in an anti-competitive way (see MS Teams). That doesn't leave much room for a startup to survive.
"We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism."
I have long said that google takes the wrong approach to supporting lots of things; but the execs just tell me to f'off and jump into their pool filled with $100 bills.
I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea.
It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.
Aren’t you providing marketing to the newspaper? Isn’t that what these news agencies pay google billions for? There’s a whole industry (seo) designed around getting your site linked.
This looks like a money grab to me. What am I missing?
Why? What moral or legal principle entitles someone to compensation for linking to their website whether or not you're profiting from that?
It's a different question when there's an excerpt or machine-generated summary. In that case, copyright applies, and in most jurisdictions it may or may not be fair use depending on what is copied and how it is presented.
Exactly. If google showing your site in search results is a problem, it's trivial to remove yourself from said search results, and to prevent your site from ever being crawled in the first place.
What's actually happening here is that news media orgs were in a huge bubble because of the advent of the internet, and they've failed to monetize effectively. So they're looking for a revenue source to shore up their failed model, and they know they'd lose revenue if they removed themselves from search results.
I think you’re ignoring that there is a path to getting to users/customers for many types of products like news, which are the tightly controlled platforms of giant tech companies (Google, Meta, etc), and there isn’t viability for products like news unless they play ball with these big tech companies. It’s not that they haven’t monetized effectively, but rather that there are gatekeepers in the way with no real competition, who can steal your margin by showing part of your news story. All of this is really a classic problem of anti-trust, and what a monopoly is today is different from the past but we haven’t acknowledged this properly in my view.
If that's true (and I agree that it is), then charging for links is going to make it even worse and effectively cement that reality for all time. How is a startup who can't afford to pay employees, let alone publishers, supposed to come by and provide some alternative?
Possibly perhaps, the big publishers (with deep pockets and lobbyists) really like this approach because despite entrenching big tech, it erects formidable barriers to entry for new upstart competitors to them? Regulatory capture is a tried and true tactic for industries that reach a certain size.
IMHO society is a lot better off trying to prevent summarization efforts (that eliminate the need for the user to visit the page) than they are trying to charge for links. The latter is something that benefits everyone regardless of size. I'm not necessarily in favor of doing that either (would need to think it through a lot more, because it would essentially legislate a worse user experience, which is not something to be done without serious deliberation), but it seems like a much more relevant fight to have and one that isn't so self-serving.
The proposed California law is written so that it basically only applies to Google and other social media giants. You need to have 50M+ monthly users, or be owned by someone with either a market cap of $550B+ or 1B+ monthly users.
So, at least in theory, some nimble startup could come in and have a lasting advantage against the big existing platforms until they got big enough that they could handle dealing with the regulations.
I do have mixed feelings about the recent laws written like this. It feels like if it's important that we pay news publishers, that should apply to everyone.
It's trivial to remove yourself from Google search results if you have a Google account. People who don't want to do business with Google don't regard that as trivial, since Google asks for a ton of personal information during onboarding.
Well, yeah it is a bad idea. Because if you tax links to your content Google will just stop linking to your content. Which is exactly what they're poised to do, as per TFA.
I worked at Google until October 2023, the blog post is in bad faith.
This is a good comment that gets at why[1], TL;DR: the hedge fund thing is a complete nonsequitur. The programs are the equivalent of Google Cloud grants, and Google actively disinvested from News[2] just because that was an easy place to get your mandated Sundar cuts for Wall Street.
They're not a good steward of anything other than their stock price.
I don't like the idea of a link tax but I do know, 100%, that blog post is slanted and mealy-mouthed on everything I know first-hand about.
The link tax is a red herring and a poor understanding on the part of legislators. The real issue is pre-adtech publishers kept 100% of ad revenue and double click now takes a massive cut (which they briefly touch on).
All that cash flowing into MTV is real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away - it’s also the reason search is entering a utility collapse curve since AI can generate unlimited click bait.
Double click will end up killing google, it’s already too late to go back.
Cheers -- I didn't know that. Interesting parallel to the 30% app store wars: people can argue till they're blue in the face with analogy after analogy, and I can easily talk myself into either perspective being obviously correct...
...at the end of the day, I'd be happy to see a tax pass, some mix of what you put excellently as "real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away", and I imagine similar to you given your MTV reference, experiencing there wasn't really anything special going on at BigCo. It's plain old economic inefficiency, not poor beleaguered good guy G that's always looking out for news and just trying to organize the world's information.
Yes and GNI was always an attempt by the wolf to curry favor with the sheep, they act like it’s some sort of grant but it’s always been about controlling narrative.
Journalists aren’t dumb either, talk to anybody who directly got one or was involved in the process.
Google has thoroughly rigged the space, including manipulating bid stream data to underpay publishers while overcharging the advertiser. It’s called Project Bernake which is public now. I have it on reliable sources there is a lot more beyond that.
The search antitrust suit was garbage, but the coming trials in the ad auction suit is going to hurt a lot more. They total lost their way, it’s actually insane when you’ll see what theyve been doing.
Google never stopped “innovating”, they just shifted their innovation to fraud.
Having never read this, current Texas anti-trust lawsuit. [1]
Alleges quite a bit, yet the main four in the article are.
1) Google says it runs a Second Price auction, but really runs a Third Price auction, ignores the 2nd bid, and takes the difference for (shifting purposes). Telling a Publisher they made $8, when they would have made $12.80.
2) Google inflates bids of buyers "to ensure their advertisers beat out bids from competing buying platforms". Artificially making their platform look better economically. Was individual cases, yet now alleged to be a global pool of stolen Publisher money.
3) Gaining access to Publisher's ad-spend behavior with Dynamic Allocation, and then using the info to make sure rival platforms seemed less competitive by manipulating and inflating other bids. Make sure they always seem to lose by $0.01 on every bid.
4) Forcing Publishers to accept Dynamic Allocation by punishing them with the maximum allowed revenue drop for Bernake (40%) while inflating competitors. Notably Machiavellian that there was a known allowed revenue drop. "We're bein nice, we'll only cut you 25%"
On a slightly different topic, made me wonder how many investment firms artificially lower rates on funds to scrape a bit of profit off the top.
All of what you write is in support of the parent post suggestion "why don’t publishers stop using doubleclick and build their own?" - the larger margin Google is taking (no matter how) between advertisers and publishers, the better deal publishers can offer when telling advertisers "come to our platform directly and get the same ad placements much cheaper"..
This reads like a young adult discovering the world has become corrupt and wondering why it changed so much since their childhood when everyone's good.
You know that thing where Google tracks every action you take online, and everything you do on your phone, and everywhere you go with your phone, and every calendar detail you enter, and every contact you keep, and every dumb curiosity you think to look up when you're bored or wanting?
Advertisers like that.
It's tough to sell them on something else, and essentially impossible to replicate as is.
I actually agree with it too. Google and Facebook aren't the reason news outlets have cash problems and a free teat to latch on to isn't the answer. News is important, but let's fix the problem in a better way.
I don't think the issue is that people aren't willing to pay for it. The problem is, there aren't currently good options for paying for it. If I go to a news site and it is paywalled, I just leave. I am not going to subscribe to every single newspaper. If I could easily pay for today's paper (not an individual news story or a full subscription) without giving up all my persona info, I would probably buy 2 - 3 papers a day from various sources.
And if you want the best news you have to pay for more than WaPo.
Besides, if you actually like to read why would you be buying washington post? People who like to read usually aren't going into 5 minute long shallow articles, they are getting a book on the topic.
Yeah lots of people don't really want to just read the news, they want to discuss it. Most people on reddit have stopped opening news article links entirely since there's always a comment or two that summarize it without having to wade through the sludge of ads and autoplaying videos, or worse, wasting your time reading the first sentence and then getting hit by a paywall. News sites are one of the most user hostile places on the internet.
Back when newspapers were healthy, basically there was all this stuff that was bundled with the actual news that was of more immediate utility to people: classifieds, movie reviews, comics, coupons. And there was less competition for people's leisure time.
News is now in a very competitive leisure time landscape and is debundled from stuff that's of high value, and most people just don't care that much about news. They'll read it when it's around but they won't pay for it. The ones who are willing to pay for it mostly just subscribe to the New York Times because in a nationalized news environment why not go for the biggest producer.
Completely agree with all this, though my take away is that there's a big vicious cycle of adblockers and paywalls where they keep getting worse. I can't afford to subscribe to every newspaper I read. All the local (and smaller national) papers should unionize and make one subscription for something like $20 a month
There is everything wrong with that if that wasn’t the deal to begin with. You’re paying for information and they’re deliberately injecting noise in the signal. It’s degrading the quality of what you’re paying for without a commensurate adjustment in the rate.
I think that is a part of it, but its not just that.
News provied two services in the old days: access and filtering.
Back in the day you couldn't easily get things straight from the horses mouth, now you can just go to their website.
If you did have direct access in the old days, it was all way too much. There was no way to filter to 10-minutes worth of top goings on. Now a days you can just look at what is upvoted and stop once you have read enough.
> most people just don't care that much about news
I stopped caring about what was happening on the world stage in 2022, and it has been sublime. I hear about the big things from friends and random folks, and it gives some instant conversation starters (“oh no, I hadn’t heard about that”). The only news I actually care about is local news, and I skim the newsletter my (small) city publishes on Fridays.
Given that, there is zero value provided to me by traditional media publishers. I say this as someone who gets NYT, WSJ, WaPo, and FT for free through work. I don’t use them, because I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
No judgement here though—if reading the paper is your thing and you like staying informed, that’s great and I fully support it. Just offering my perspective.
I’m not sure I agree that news is more competitive now within its own business? (I’m not sure what the Danish branche is in English), but rather that there are just so many things competing for people’s attention in general. With SoMe being actively designed to be addictive through various algorithms I think it’s only natural that people spend more of their time on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit or even HackerNews. I think that is time that a lot of people would’ve otherwise spend on news.
Add to this the introduction of terrible news media. The spam and click bait media, where you get the articles for free but the articles you get are basically worse than what you’d find anywhere else because they are most there to generate revenue from advertising. Stuff that gives “traditional” news media a very bad image. Further add the media platforms which are now straight up political propaganda, which some always where, but now they are owned by very few people and push very divisive agendas which is a little different from the past where they were more inline with each other and the “general” aristocracy rather than a few billionaires/oligarchs and you gain the general media perception even more. Both are rightfully so.
In a sense you get what you pay for though. If you’re not paying you’re not getting quality news. You can see this in Danish news very clearly, where only a handful of news papers still do actual critical journalism and the rest mainly do opinions or click-bait articles on current events that you might as well read on Facebook. Not because Facebook does anything particularly in that department but because the contractors who sell stories and pictures to the “free” news media typically also post their content elsewhere for increased revenue on their part.
As far as going to the “biggest” most “cultural” news media I totally agree with you. In my country people read Weekend Avisen, and then add one of the more politically inclined subscription papers based on their views. But basically it boils down to thee papers, one that is slightly more conservative (which in Scandinavian/American optics would make it almost socialist), one that is left-leaning (again, very socialist in American optics) and one that is based on Christianity (but extremely moderate, as in pro abortion and gay marriage).
Aside from that there are two “localised” papers which either focus heavily on Copenhagen or the part of our country which is called Jylland.
Almost none of these papers would be alive without government subsidies. Because the only two papers which actually makes money are Weekendavisen (our NYT) and the Christian paper which doesn’t actually make money but is subsidised by various Christian groups.
To expand, journalists used to actually investigate which took time which means it took money so that the story released had lots of corroborating sources, scrutinized by editors, and then released as a complete story. That might have meant things like actually interviewing people, requesting documents from places, or visiting the places in question.
Today, it is just a bunch of people collecting tweets of random people on the interwebs. Race to publish before competition means there's no time for editorial review of simple things like grammar and coherent thoughts let alone accuracy, so lots of FUD can be spread very quickly as "news".
Those well thought out articles are also considered too long and boring and get reposted on socials as TL;DR as if it were their own thoughts.
We used to make fun of the microwave generation with "I want it now" type comments. Now, it's I need it in less than 140chars, or I'm scrolling past it.
The death spiral you describe is like a train wreck that you can do nothing about.
The most infuriating thing is that an article can take absolutely any stance on an issue simply by cherry picking tweets to go along with it.
News has become a weird kind of curation market. And the funny thing about this payment arrangement that publishers want is that they are not paying any of those tweeters who may be breaking the news or themselves curating the info.
Why would you pay someone for a tweet? They posted it for free. Collecting tweets isn't journalism. Asking the user for more than 140 chars about what they are witnessing along with multiple others would then be closer to journalism. Tweets are just people self identifying who journalists could be interviewing. The interview allows for follow up to the tweet.
If I see tweets in any article other than tweets from the people that the article is about, I will throw that news site in the dust bin. Using tweets as evidence or as anything important tells me that news site is definitely in a death spiral. I think the only place I put up with it is on the local news and even then I'm gritting my teeth.
> To expand, journalists used to actually investigate which took time which means it took money so that the story released had lots of corroborating sources, scrutinized by editors, and then released as a complete story. That might have meant things like actually interviewing people, requesting documents from places, or visiting the places in question.
This was only desired and seen as useful and interesting when people had nothing else to do.
Facts are not copyrightable, so the meat of a story spreads quickly and with very little money changing hands. One subscriber to the Los Angeles Times can legally and immediately share the factual essence of an article via social media, personal web site, email, or anything else. From there it can be reshared indefinitely. Only people who really want to read the original reporting in full will pay to subscribe to the LA Times.
There used to be regional/temporal barriers in place before the Web was popular; newspapers had geographically limited distribution and it took time to print a new edition. One newspaper "scooping" another by one day was all it took to get people to buy the one-day-earlier publication. Also, 20th century newspapers collected significant revenue from classified advertising, people buying the paper just to get a weather forecast, and other kinds of information distribution that really didn't have anything to do with investigative news. The Web unbundled all that (weather.gov, Craigslist, etc.) and the only remaining strength of newspapers was producing original reporting. Which, unfortunately, was never all that profitable on its own even before you get to the "facts are not copyrightable" issue that I mentioned in my first paragraph.
Does anyone have any good pages on that which go into how to extract facts without copyright infringement? And for purposes of creating independent, educational works from those facts?
The value proposition in the internet age is too low to demand the price neccessary to support it. This created a race to the bottom in order to keep the lights on. This further degraded the value of the product. This caused people to value it less, and so on.
The end result is reputable news sites became clickbait and eventually people stopped caring.
There is still a market for in depth journalism, and we see a rise in that sort of things. There are plenty of youtube channels doing documentary-like videos on current events. That is journalism.
The journalism that is dying is the stuff concentrating on breaking news. If its shallow its outcompeted by twitter. If its higher quality but still racing to the headline, its outcompeted by wikipedia. The fact is the competitors to breaking news journalism are cheaper and higher quality.
In simple terms; lots of competition and much of it is free. If you want basic breaking news, it's all over social media (often from the news sites themselves). If you want sports, tech, gaming, music, entertainment, art or other hobby style news, it's literally on two million websites and forums and YouTube channels specifically made for that one topic, and usually done better than in a newspaper.
So while you could say a decent chunk of the replacement content is worse than what traditional news outlets could offer, it's at least free and exists by the bucket load, meaning the incentive for paying for it is nonexistent for most of the population. Meanwhile the more niche stuff is both free and done better elsewhere, so RIP anyone making money off that anymore.
To make things tougher, getting advertisers to pay for it is becoming a lost cause too, since again, they can advertise in places where metrics and tracking options are better. They'll get way more bang for their buck on social media than they will trying to market on a news site or in a classifieds section or what not.
I think very few people ever "paid for news" -- the newsroom of most publications have always been highly subsidized by advertising and classifieds, and perhaps newstand sales. Google (and others) and Craigslist (and others) quickly dominated advertising and classifieds in the early 2000s, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone reading a newspaper on a train
The circulation subscriptions were a substantial part of their revenue, however you're right that ads were even larger. I don't think it's fair to say few people ever paid for it though. Subscriptions were important too.
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for journalism, but it has to be journalism above and beyond the basic info that you can get for free online. The basic news is commoditized and freely available online, and that's what a lot of traditional newspapers are competing with. However, paid industry journalism like The Information is something people are willing to pay for - or get their companies to pay for at least.
Also, I think traditional newspapers should position themselves so they're not competing with the lowest common denominator of basic info, however due to cutbacks, most newspapers are in essence not doing very much in depth journalism anymore, which means they are unfortunately positioning themselves as competing with any other source of news.
Many people are willing to pay for news. Enough that it will keep coming in excess. Just not enough to sustain the scale and production values of yesteryear.
Plenty of independent journalists are out there doing just fine and even some of the big outlets have adjusted effectively. But in the internet age we don't need hundreds of outlets all reporting on the same stories 24/7 - especially when most of those stories have no impact on the viewers/readers.
The market is simply adjusting and the old establishment is going down kicking and screaming.
Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of a symbiotic relationship. Google gets a useful news page, the news media get links to their articles.
I honestly could care less about either of them. I think they should just fight it out on their own and keep our legal system and tax payers time and money out of it.
>Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of a symbiotic relationship.
There's definitely some symbiosis here, but it's ultimately Google that's dependent on the news (and other) sites' content, which it gets for free. That is, the news sites (and other content providers) could exist without Google. But, Google could not exist without their content.
At least that's my observation. So, I wasn't picking a side as much as earnestly asking how OP concluded that its the news sites wanting something free from Google versus the other way around.
Those sites rely on sites like Facebook and Google linking to their content to lead readers in. With the ban on Canada their public campaign has made that obvious.
>Those sites rely on sites like Facebook and Google linking to their content to lead readers in
Of course, that's the way it is. But, is it a good thing that they've intermediated all of the world's content?
It's easy to argue that the problem is exactly that a relative handful of sites have a monopoly on traffic and, what's more, they've gained that monopoly for free.
30 seconds of serious thought would tell you that your observation is wrong.
Again, a news organization can just change their robots.txt to block google from indexing their site.
They don't do that because that would instantly kill all their search traffic... and most likely kill their business.
If CNN changed their robots.txt to stop being indexed by Google, Google would literally lose 0 users.
> I wasn't picking a side as much as earnestly asking how OP concluded that its the news sites wanting something free from Google versus the other way around.
It's been explained to you several times. Instead you're more interested in acting self-righteous (it's honestly pretty cringeworthy).
>30 seconds of serious thought would tell you that your observation is wrong.
Or, maybe I just have a different opinion.
>news organization can just change their robots.txt to block google from indexing their site
You don't seem to have thought beyond this superficial robots.txt "solution". Yes, we all know that option is available. But, as I've self-righteously offered for consideration, Google is one of a few sites that essentially monopolizes traffic generation, so they've positioned themselves to make it untenable for sites to block Google's crawling (and free monetization) of their content.
Cory Doctorow has (another) recent Twitter thread on how tech monopolies have grown virtually unchecked and now abuse the ecosystems in which they operate, increasingly clawing back more value for themselves at the expense of others. IMO this fits the pattern. Look it up. You might find it interesting. Or not.
>They don't do that because that would instantly kill all their search traffic...and most likely kill their business.
And there you've just stated exactly the problem I'm referencing, with apparently zero awareness of how someone could find it problematic. I mean, you just said "they could solve the problem by blocking Google via robots.txt, but that would kill their business".
So, not exactly a solution then, right?
It's baffling that you can say this but still angrily scream that "It's robots.txt! Case closed!"
>It's been explained to you several times. Instead you're more interested in acting self-righteous (it's honestly pretty cringeworthy).
You clearly don't hear yourself. Calm down.
EDIT: out of curiosity, I just took a quick look at your recent comments to others. One of the first to pop up was this:
>What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....?
What exactly is being "monetized" when a search result is displayed for a news article that will bring the users to news site where they'll earn ad money to the news outlet?
The news outlet can use robots.txt to prevent indexing. If Google doesn't bring them value, there's the easy answer.
>but that's not what this is about, this is about charging for linking to news articles.
Sure, but these things are directly related. It's the scraping that generates the links in question and ultimately earns Google ad revenue. And, if they did pay on the scraping side, then charging for linking would be less relevant. As it is, they're collecting the content, but not paying on either end.
So, it seems if you agree they should pay for the scraping (but they are not), then you wouldn't be opposed to them paying on the other end. In fact, this might be fairer to Google b/c it's pay for performance.
But, more to the point, I was responding to OP's specific-claim that the news sites were attempting to "latch on to a free teat".
"scraping" usually refers to unauthorized access for the purposes of using that content for something else. what google does to generate search result pages is usually called "indexing", and websites go out of their way to encourage google to do more of it.
Understood. I use the term "scraping" loosely and, admittedly, purposely. I think it's illustrative of the broader point I was attempting to make.
But, if you really want to be precise, what Google actually does is more commonly (and euphemistically) referred to as "crawling". And, it is more accurate to say that they are crawling for the purpose of indexing what they've crawled. Crawling is essentially the front end of an overall process which ends with indexed results.
Whatever the nomenclature you prefer, the effect is the same, and so is my point.
>websites go out of their way to encourage google
I understand that some websites "encourage" Google, and that intersects with the alternative point of view I've been suggesting. That is, that Google is monopolistic in its traffic ownership and the content owners have little choice but to offer their content to be freely monetized by Google. It's also worth pointing out that there are some businesses which are built around SEO from the ground up while others—like news outlets—pre-existed Google but now rely on them to survive. These are different.
To further close the loop, my suggestion was that the original topic of this thread might also be seen as somewhat of a remedy for that effect. And, frankly, it's strange to me that you will allow that Google should be paying sites for their scraping or crawling or whatever, but don't seem to be connecting it to my point, when it really could be viewed as an alternative remedy to the problem I'm describing.
Overall, I believe mine is a more interesting and accurate way to look at the problem than to simply accept that Google has intermediated so many content sites and their consumers as some natural and universally right state of affairs.
In any case, I don't think Google's search business model or that SEO is a thing, etc. is lost on anyone on HN. And, thought I might encounter more interesting discussion here around my view. But it seems most people here have accepted that Google just owns the traffic and everybody must play along. Further, that it's really for their own good. I suppose it's become harder to imagine a world where content producers own their content and are not coerced into giving it away for need of traffic from a single monopolistic source without whom their business might not survive.
But, it's somewhat surprising when I zoom out and think about the spirit of "hacking" and the audience that used to more predominantly frequent HN. Thinking back to staunch support of folks like Aaron Swartz and other topics. Maybe I'm the only one who sees these as somewhere along the same continuum. And that's fine.
Nonetheless, I find this discussion tedious and boring by now, as I'm sure others do my "alternative perspective". So, let's just agree to disagree, rather than have these pedantic restatements of definitions and Google's well-known search business model as if these are somehow dispositive.
Just to think about this more, are there any other business types, besides online news, where your success so radically depends on the decisions (read google news ranking and summarization algorithms) of some other business that you have zero relations with.
Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in the economy?
EDIT: the criteria of zero business relationship between your entire product class and the Big Business is critical; otherwise lots of examples exist.
There is a business relationship between Walmart/Costco and the product or a competitor of the product. In the Google News case, there is no business relation with any news site (Alphabet ads might have a relation with the news site, but that is not Google News).
I think they key is that in your example, Cosco/Walmart was "buying" from the company and is now "buying" from a competitor. Google's typically not "buying" from anyone when they choose who to list on their pages (only "selling" exposure, in cases of paid advertising).
There isn't a single physical product that's not beholden to the Walmarts of the world to stock, market and highlight those products. There isn't a single farmer in this world that isn't dependant on stores buying off their produce and putting it into shelves.
Heck, even in paper era, there wasn't a single paper not beholden to kiosks and other stores to put their papers into racks and into premium places where customers are most likely to pick them up. Do you hink NYTimes demanded that street vendors pay them for the privilege of putting their paper onto a rack?!
Having fully vertically integrated bussiness (like you're mentioning) is a very modern development of monopolies.
Newspapers obviously sold their paper to the paper kiosks, who then sold it to customers. Hence a business relationship between the two types of entities.
In the Google News case, no news sites sells their news to Google News. There is no business relation between Google News or any de jure contact whatsoever between the two. It's different. I am not saying its good or bad, or that this gives the right to the news sites for news sites to demand payments from Google.
But I think its a weird scenario that doesn't occur in other markets. And to understand the pathologies of the online news business, we need to think about this particular no-relations fact.
Going back a few decades, newspapers were dependent on the newsstands they were sold out of. They could put your paper higher or lower on the stand (ranking).
Going back not as far, CNN was dependent on your local cable company to deliver their signal to homes. Charter or Comcast could choose to stop carrying a channel altogether.
There are lots of examples of people who produce things being beholden to a few companies that controls the distribution channels.
A more interesting one is small businesses and payment processors which don't control the distribution but rather keep them operationally dependant on a product they control a monopoly over.
Virtually every product and service with a website and social media presence? If you get banned from Google, your visibility online pretty much falls off a cliff and your sales will likely never recover. So anyone making money from a website is dependent on Google and other search engines... well mostly Google indexing said site.
Also, any business whose livelihood depends on a large company's platform. Businesses and entrepreneurs selling their work on Amazon and eBay, YouTubers and Twitch streamers making content for those platforms, influencers in general given their reliance on social media services...
Except for Google search+product combo, in every other example you cited there is a contractual relation between the product and the SM.
If I have a product page on Facebook, I have a contract with Facebook. Facebook could choose to end that contract with me and close my account. But Google News blocking/downranking a news site does not involve any contract ending between Google News and the news site. If I don't have a product page on Facebook, Facebook could still choose to block/downrank posts where users on their own free will mention my product. But I don't think this really happens at any significant scale yet.
Same applies your Amazon/Ebay/Youtube/Twitch examples.
No matter how hard you try to avoid it, some asshole will always post any video you make to YouTube immediately and probably try to monetize it.
Given how much money Google collects for YouTube, they should get fined through the roof when they allow somebody to upload something they don't have the rights to.
The porn companies showed that you solve this technically. However, Google will fight this to the very end.
Does it? If I summarize a book, do I need to pay a fee? News (much like recipes) is not directly covered by copyright (facts cannot be copyrighted). Only the expression (exact wording) is (which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story).
Legality aside, I can understand how reading a short news article (especially when paying only via ad views) and then summarizing information that lots of people are probably interested in right at this moment is likely to be more detrimental to a writer's business model than reading an entire book (possibly after purchasing a copy) and then summarizing information that's likely to be less timely.
> which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story
I see this claimed often but it doesn't make any sense - anyone can still copy the recipe without the story and then the copy would even provide more value than the original.
Seems to me padding recipes with fluff is mostly about SEO and maximizing ad impressions.
Google has single-handely ruined the internet, and absolutely warped our expectations around what the economics of content creation looks like online. Google earns money from that content. Why wouldn’t the content creators be entitled to a cut?
Oh please, most content online was shared freely long before google came along.
On the contrary, it's the for-profit content creators and to a much bigger extend the monetizing platforms that have latched on to the open web and are now trying to redefine it. Meanwhile, most content is still created by users like you and me who are not going to get any of the ad profits these platforms are crying about.
Oh please, what? There’s nothing wrong or malicious or un-open with running a business by selling content online. You’re deeply confusing open and free. A marketplace built on open standards is still open.
Google has been at the helm of the web for at least 15 years. “Before Google came along” was before the consolidation of the internet. Google consolidated the internet behind Search, their browser, SEO, even Amp pages (remember that dumpster fire? So open, right?), as they slowly tolled more and more of the internet, while keeping traffic flowing to their advertisers.
Content creators are entitled to a cut of the profits that Google makes from selling ads while presenting their content. I hope this law passes and every other state follows suit.
I'm actually ok with this given that google is the source of the internet's dependency on advertisements as its sole method of reliable income for non-subscribers. They are more than welcome to reintroduce less destructive methods of transacting over content.
> given that google is the source of the internet's dependency on advertisements
I remember the internet before Google. There were lots of ads. It was great watching animated GIF ads load at 56 Kbps. There were pop-up adds and crazy obnoxious flashing ads and NSFW ads. Google didn't create all of that: the ad-sphere was alive and kicking long before anyone heard of Google.
Yes there were obnoxious ads that popped up, but we didn’t have the same degree of monopolization in platforms or walled gardens, and we didn’t have so many industries whose existence depends on online advertising. Google and Facebook’s ads may not be as obnoxious but there’s more of them (look at how many ads there are on search results page) and they’ve affected the viability of many other parts of the economy in my opinion.
> Google didn't create all of that: the ad-sphere was alive and kicking long before anyone heard of Google.
I never said they did. Hell, print publications were nearly as bad as the internet has become—marketing is simply a large societal problem we have no solution for. I still place the blame for lack of other funding models squarely on them—any other funding model would have undercut their entire existence, and no other company has had such a profound impact on the web (particularly with the demise of netscape).
No, they bought it in the form of Doubleclick, and its profits supported the rest of their money-losing business. If buying Doubleclick doesn't make you responsible for Doubleclick, I don't know what does.
People wouldn't tolerate the level of online ad blight we had 20 years ago, there are ad-blockers now; the reason Google isn't going buckwild with ads is because it can't.
Google penalizes link-farms, and websites who copy content from others, but adopts a holier-than-thou attitude for itself. Not very surprising. There is no inherent "legitimacy" when Google (as the worlds largest spyware vendor) does it.
Yes, but those link-farms get de-ranked by Google (which is a good thing IMO). Google is pretending that their particular case of linking is legitimate and deserves fair-use protection.
I don't think Google is pretending. Its linking is legitimate. Also, it feels strange to draw an equivalence between Google downranking a spam website and the government charging to link to things.
There is no difference between content/link farms and what Google is doing - its copy/pasting someone else's words on a website and surrounding them with ads.
I work in news technology, including with many local news organizations, both corporate and independent, including in California. Google does not support all news organizations equally, and this seems designed to gain some leverage over organizations that do get a lot from Google. Their Google News Initiative is on its surface just a training platform for publishers to learn how to use Google’s tools but they’ve done quite a bit more for some publishers. This feels like an attempt to gain the vocal support of publishers who have been blessed by Google’s beneficence, many of which are earnest non-profit organizations who might take the bait about big bad hedge funds. I don’t know how they select who to help and who to ignore and our attempts to engage with them on behalf of publishers have had mixed results.
But publishers’ collective frustration with Google is quite high. Given the implications that “it would be a shame if something happened to your nice journalism website” coupled with the appeal against the big bad hedge funds and ghost papers, it’s sort of a clever position but I’m not sure it will work.
This requires some nuance, since I think it goes beyond a "tax on linking," as I have seen it described.
News is a strange product, and one that I think a lot of people in tech get wrong. The atomic unit of journalism is not an article....it's the reporting. Even deciding to write an article is an act based on the analysis of the reporting.
Further, a good headline often tells the story itself -- and that is implicitly included when we talk about links. How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link? Probably a bunch. But you still know OJ died, or the bridge in Baltimore collapsed, etc, etc. That level of reporting, the confirmation that it happened, all that stuff -- all was expensive, all required labor and other resources.
So -- from the consumer perspective, what happens? You get clickbait. The publishers have to recoup the expenses somehow, and they need you to click through to show you ads, or a paywall. "This item in your cabinet could kill you!" Or, they cover the site with ads, hoping to get as much out of the few clicks they get.
I am not saying this in support of the CJPA, nor in support of Google. Just saying this is an existential crisis that came from the simple act of aggregation.
(Disclaimer/shameless plug: I'm a former journalist building https://www.forth.news, a social-media like news feed for reading news. While we are not there yet, our goal is to be able to revshare with the reporters/newsrooms who write the stories to be able to monetize those headlines.)
It's true, journalism is a tough business, but that doesn't justify bending the rules in their favor.
Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
In the end, people choose to do open source knowing that they're not going to get much money out of it.
I wasn't advocating for a position -- I also think this law will have unintended negative consequences.
My point is simply that this is more than just linking. It's a full-on parasitic relationship, where Google (and Meta, and others) take the reporting that others are doing and build their own traffic off of that, while draining the people doing the work dry. News orgs are then faced with a terrible choice -- cut off the source of traffic or give it away for free. That's different than a dev deciding to open source a project.
Yes, and it gets even more fun when the source is summarizing your page, and feeding it to their AI assistant, so they stop sending you much traffic.
The business model of links + ads is going to be more in peril in the future than it is today, regardless of the regulatory environment. We see the problem all over media: If you are relying on google to give you traffic, your content better be really cheap and SEO'd to death, or be a funnel where most content is hidden, trying to drive people into subscriptions. Agglomeration in the traffic driving and ad spaces leads to them taking most of the profit unless there's agglomeration on the other end. Just like in American healthcare, more people using the same insurance companies that try to drag reimbursement rates down is met by hospital networks gobbling up practices and pharmacies, as to get market power that the insurer cannot ignore. So we'll see situations where, say, Google and the NYT have to decide whether the search traffic is worth it, and what's the right price for letting the latest AI ingest the entire contents of the Times.
It's not about moral good or bad, but about how incentive structures leave us with few viable economic models. Both software engineers and journalists will change behavior to make more money.
I think the mistake here is that news orgs are trying to invent a business transaction where there isn't any. Either what Google/Meta are doing is copyright infringement in which case they have to stop or pay to license the content itself, or it's not and they're free to keep on keeping on. I would be surprised that after 30 years of public search engines we're just now deciding that it's copyright infringement. You could argue the summaries are for sure, but regular search results and the little context snippets that show what part of the article matched your query seem totally fine.
Search engines and social networks don't owe sites they link or their users link to any traffic. It would be silly to be like, "it's only copyright infringement if users don't click through the link enough."
> Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
I do think there should be some laws around funding certain open source software that has become critical to the functioning of society -- whether or not that's paid by tax payers in general, or by the companies using that software is a different question though.
Government funded open source strikes me as something that can very much make sense, in certain cases. Some software very much operates at utility scale, and yet, doesn't have a funding model beyond the good will of volunteers. This is dangerous, and also the type of situation that the government exists to solve.
So, yes, companies probably should pay for at least some open source software, maybe indirectly through tax, maybe through some other mechanism.
You can make the likely accurate claim that democracy can't function without functional, effective independent journalism. So how much is it worth requiring so that democracy is upheld?
Nobody is saying this is wrong. However if journalism is so valuable then the government (so really, the people) should be subsidizing it. Passing illogical laws and putting the burden on 2-3 big tech companies makes zero sense.
Google News is operating a content + link farm by copy/pasting content from other sites. Google is pretending to be legitimate but in realty they are just as trashy. If anyone else was doing it, Google would have banned them faster than you can blink.
I downvoted you because I think you provided an overly facile explanation that focuses too much on headlines rather than the actual issue here.
A headline has always been an attempt to sell an article access to headlines and has a long history of freely accessible for this reason. Publishers WANT links to their article to use their headlines because that is how the articles are sold.
You talk about the 'atomic unit of journalism' being reporting... but that isn't really a meaningful assertion. What is meaningful is that facts are not copyrightable (which is good.) If you are selling access to facts as your product, you have to differentiate yourself on either storytelling, curation or speed.
Notably, the California law covers all links, not just those that include a summary or headline.
I don't think the crisis has anything to do with aggregation. I think the crisis has to do with how money is spent on advertising, how much of that money Google is able to extract via their monopoly, and the degree to which we've allowed capital markets to gut such a vital institution. I think the EFF report linked in the article does a much better job of breaking down the issue, even if I don't agree with every recommendation it makes or think they are sufficient.
My point is that sharing links is a double edged sword that was sort of forced on the news publishers. They've grown dependent on the traffic -- and agreed, they need a different business model -- but thats tough when anyone else can undercut you and publish for free, and then compete for that same traffic.
Also, if you think you can differentiate on curation or speed, you cannot, because those same links will appear regardless.
And yes, the advertising monopoly is a huge part of this -- but the argument has always been that the search engines need news just as much as news needs search engines. But they've set up the situation in a way that they have all the leverage.
> sharing links is a double edged sword that was sort of forced on the news publishers.
What are you talking about? "sharing links" was not forced on publishers by anyone, not even sort of. Sharable links to content are not in any way damaging, so can't be a double edged sword. Sharable links are purely beneficial and you have done zero of the work to show otherwise.
> How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link?
Somewhat related - I have clicked a lot more on Axios articles which I know are 2-5 minute reads, compared to other long form articles where the author wanted to write a novella. Infact I look forward to reading Axios articles which I know are well written, compared to others which are of varying quality, so less inclination to click.
> How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link? Probably a bunch.
How often did the news service that published that headline also break the story vs acquired it from AP or another wire service?
I pay for NYT, WSJ and local news because I want news companies to exist. But news companies have a huge anti-tech bias (because they compete for ad revenue). NYT explicitly had a "no good news on tech" policy for a while (still?). There is a missing business model for news because it's hard to monetize, and information is free. Society should figure this out, and establish its values - but trying to pretend that google search results (or Facebook posts) are the evil villain killing news instead of the free movement of information on the internet at large is naive.
If they don't think that Google is giving them a good deal they can simply opt-out of the index. But they don't want to do that, because Google is giving them value.
This is their method of side-channeling an "unfair" deal. If they actually wanted a fair negotiation they would just go to Google directly and say "we will opt out of indexing unless you pay us $X". But they think they can get more money by lobbying a law to force Google to accept a better deal.
I grew up with actual paper newspapers, and what I recall from that era is newspaper kiosks and stands that had front pages of dozens of newspapers, plastered over every available inch of space. People would come and stand by the kiosk and read them - for free - and sometimes, some of them would purchase something, but most did not. You could learn about most news that were, well, news-worthy without paying for anything.
This is just another non-sensical law that allows the dying news publishers to shakedown other successful companies. News publishers have to evolve. NYT did a wonderful turnaround, as an example.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Eventually, of course, it will "only be fair" that we should pay a tax to speak about the news at all, to anyone. Or at least to submit what we plan to say about the news to the approval committee.
Journalism will cease to exist if everyone just reads the aggregator summaries instead of clicking the link and at least giving the news org some ad revenue. The reality is that the government has to do something if we want a free press to continue as vanishingly few are willing to pay anything. I dont think this is the best solution but Im not sure its worse than the status quo of "no one in journalism except NYT makes any money"
Private equity firms are buying up local news outfits then lobby to force google/fb to pay up. It's an extortion racket which news outlets refuse to cover for some reason.
People were predicting this would happen when Google caved and started paying "link tax" to Australia and Canada and other jurisdictions with similar laws. Now – to no surprise – every government (really every media conglomerate lobbying arm) around the world wants the free money and so more such laws are popping up.
Dunno about Australia but Google ‘won’ in Canada, where the government agreed to accept what Google had originally offered, and make it up to their corporate media buddies in the following budget.
It ended with a negotiation and Google agreeing to pay $100M+ annually to Canadian news organizations, so I wouldn't exactly call that a "win" for them.
>Oh, you posted this story we really didn't like. Sorry, this month's check got lost in the mail. We'll sort it out in 6-15 business days.
Businesses eventually become reliant on significant revenue streams which gives the party that provides them power over the business.
It might not even be Google doing anything nefarious, just a case of "sorry, but our business is doing poorly and we might have to shut down Google News and stop paying if this keeps up."
In Australia there were concessions where the Australian gov of the time thought that having Google negotiate an agreement only with the major outlets (Rupert Murdoch) was acceptable so they don't pay every paper, just the ones that agree with the Liberal party (a right wing party) viewpoints.
The liberal party is now out of power but the labor party has no courage to stand up to Murdoch to repeal this.
It was all very clever and basically a way to fund right wing media in Australia via big tech. Blatantly corrupt as fuck and people need to be arrested for what went on to create this law but definitely clever.
I’m not sure this addresses the parent comment specifically mentioning the first amendment. I don’t think anyone was saying that the US is unique in having free speech laws or that those laws are a free-for-all.
However, it seems to at least be a common belief that US free speech laws are often interpreted more broadly than free speech laws in several other countries. Moreover, compelled speech (as noted by the commenter) seems not unrelated here. For instance, see the somewhat recent Colorado web designer case [1].
I don't think most consumers of news content really think about the difference between a source, a syndicate, or an aggregator. And a significant portion likely don't know the difference. Media literacy is a significant problem, both in the US and in many parts of the world.
"It’s well known that people are getting news from sources like short-form video, topical newsletters, social media, and curated podcasts, and many are avoiding the news entirely. In line with those trends, just 2% of queries on Google Search are news-related. Nevertheless, we want to continue making targeted contributions to the news ecosystem to help news publishers navigate this inflection point."
Google acknowledges they had a part to play in causing the collapse of journalism but has no solutions to offer.
People aren't consuming news, and when they do they choose the least accurate, most entertaining sources for it. Newspapers and local broadcasters are suffering because the public has lost the will or the capacity to focus. When will we start seeing white box Surgeon General warnings on Tiktok and Youtube that remind the user prolonged exposure can cause serious mental health issues? [1] Where's the DARE school-visit campaigns to remind kids that broadcast news is free over the air and their parents are chumps for paying streaming services' subscription fees?
> When will we start seeing white box Surgeon General warnings on Tiktok and Youtube that remind the user prolonged exposure can cause serious mental health issues?
We won't (or if we do they won't accomplish anything), because once you've moved to a low-trust society, which we are rapidly doing, any official statements telling you which information to consume/avoid are seen as Enemy Action and make you trust your outside sources even harder. You can find tons of Zoomers saying they get news from Tiktok specifically because it's not under the control of The Man (even though it's controlled by the Chinese government, the ultimate The Man). There are no easy fixes here.
I wonder if these media conglomerates think the same laws should apply to them. If your news article has any linked information in it, you need to pay money to the owner of that link every time your article is opened. Seems only fair.
That's also absurd that modern news sites think they are so trustworthy that they don't even bother to cite or link to the studies or subjects they're talking about. Sometimes it's a bit insane when wikipedia only requires a link to a news site to consider something verified.
They sometimes do. And even otherwise, most "news" these days is snippets and summarization of existing online content, the exact thing they are complaining about.
Isn’t the issue that Google links to websites and then reduces their commercial viability by showing summaries in search pages or by having their AI present the data without letting the website get the traffic? If so, I think a link tax is justified. At that point, Google is creating value for itself by removing value from others so it seems fair to me. And we don’t need the law to be perfect - let’s just make it applicable to companies with market capitalization above 100 billion.
But more than this, the big tech companies are just too powerful and their mere existence is anti competitive. I think that issue needs to be addressed independent of media outlets specifically. For example with AI, big tech companies are in a position to put themselves first in front of customers and prevent any smaller players from competing for users and market share. Now Apple and Microsoft are forcing their AI agents onto phones and computers, and potentially violating privacy of users and using all their data for training or other purposes. We’ve seen such a long history of anti competitive practices from these companies, and rather than dealing with performative court cases that drag out for years, we need to deal with the fact that they’re too big. They need to be split up. Or maybe just get taxed more compared to everyone else.
> For example with AI, big tech companies are in a position to put themselves first in front of customers and prevent any smaller players from competing for users and market share.
I agree. But it still has not been fixed or even acknowledged broadly. And with each new successive wave of innovation (like AI), it seems they are able to simply take up all the profits that could exist, without working hard and competing fairly for it.
My understanding is you have to ask to be in the news wheel.
Anyone can ask to be removed from the index. The internet is old enough that it has long been standard that search is opt out, when you are part of the World Wide Web.
Does that matter though? If they control the means of getting to the user for entire segments, it makes alternatives less viable. Users don’t have much choice (it’s not like there is another competing news UI element that a user can choose to occupy those parts of the screen) and there isn’t really fair competition.
Can't speak for what Google plans to do in the future, but currently news results in search can either be a "top stories" block at the top of the results, or regular search results. In "top stories" you get just the headline and maybe an associated picture. In regular search results you get the headline, and a fragment of the first sentence of the article.
If seeing the headline and maybe a tiny fragment of the first words is enough to remove commercial viability, there's a lot of things that do that. Physical newspapers/magazines are generally displayed in a way that provides that information, for instance.
I'm sure there are people who search, see the headline, and don't click through. But the counterargument is that other people do click through, and without the search results then the news website wouldn't have received any of that traffic.
Perhaps-ironically, it looks like a full AI-synthesis approach would be a way to get around paying the news orgs under this law. If the Google results just give a synthesized blend of news from across the web without linking to anything in particular...
Agree that charging on a link is bad. I'd even argue, that if you are going to charge for linking to an article, then I'd expect no ads on that site.
But, anything beyond a link starts to open up questions for me.
Who even uses Google's AI summarize feature for articles? For me, most of the time it's been because the pop-up for it jumped in the way for me and it was an accidental click. When I have intentionally used it, it's been a pretty poor summary and misses key nuances that make the article unique compared to other publishers.
Taking a step back further, I don't know who is asking for this feature. What's the target market here?
Also, perhaps I'm wrong here but I don't think anyone would want an AI summarized version of other types of media like songs or movies.
I disagree, a "link tax" is the wrong choice of response, and incredibly dangerous to a free/distributed internet: Once it exists in principle its scope will not remain limited to affecting only big unsympathetic search-engine companies, it'll start affecting other sites (like, say, HN) and get abused to deter critics from pointing to the things they want to criticize.
If any source-page with a link is "summarizing" way too much about the destination... well, then there's already a mechanism for that: "Sue them for copyright infringement."
Right now things like titles and brief summaries and whatnot are clearly fair-use, but that's not guaranteed to be a defense against some future "you can't directly point at my page" law.
With the increasing shift of media companies from reporting the news to selling an ideology, they should be welcoming people linking to it and summarizing their sales pitch.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadBut I agree these link taxes are a fundamentally broken concept where legacy media looks to strongarm funds out of others for sharing their publicly shared news.
The whole thing smells like wealth distribution ("hmm, the journalism industry is struggling, but the tech industry is booming. The tech industry interacts with the journalism industry, maybe we can help the journalism industry by mandating a new wealth gradient flowing from one to support the other?")
It seems like Google and Amazon shutting down or divesting some products would make room for a lot of competitors to step in and dominate that space.
I have long said that google takes the wrong approach to supporting lots of things; but the execs just tell me to f'off and jump into their pool filled with $100 bills.
It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.
If you're profiting from it, it's not a bad idea.
This looks like a money grab to me. What am I missing?
It's a different question when there's an excerpt or machine-generated summary. In that case, copyright applies, and in most jurisdictions it may or may not be fair use depending on what is copied and how it is presented.
If they don't want a Google to index them they can use robots.txt to prevent it.
What's actually happening here is that news media orgs were in a huge bubble because of the advent of the internet, and they've failed to monetize effectively. So they're looking for a revenue source to shore up their failed model, and they know they'd lose revenue if they removed themselves from search results.
Possibly perhaps, the big publishers (with deep pockets and lobbyists) really like this approach because despite entrenching big tech, it erects formidable barriers to entry for new upstart competitors to them? Regulatory capture is a tried and true tactic for industries that reach a certain size.
IMHO society is a lot better off trying to prevent summarization efforts (that eliminate the need for the user to visit the page) than they are trying to charge for links. The latter is something that benefits everyone regardless of size. I'm not necessarily in favor of doing that either (would need to think it through a lot more, because it would essentially legislate a worse user experience, which is not something to be done without serious deliberation), but it seems like a much more relevant fight to have and one that isn't so self-serving.
The text: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB886/id/2832517
So, at least in theory, some nimble startup could come in and have a lasting advantage against the big existing platforms until they got big enough that they could handle dealing with the regulations.
I do have mixed feelings about the recent laws written like this. It feels like if it's important that we pay news publishers, that should apply to everyone.
This is a good comment that gets at why[1], TL;DR: the hedge fund thing is a complete nonsequitur. The programs are the equivalent of Google Cloud grants, and Google actively disinvested from News[2] just because that was an easy place to get your mandated Sundar cuts for Wall Street.
They're not a good steward of anything other than their stock price.
I don't like the idea of a link tax but I do know, 100%, that blog post is slanted and mealy-mouthed on everything I know first-hand about.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015572
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/technology/google-layoffs...
All that cash flowing into MTV is real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away - it’s also the reason search is entering a utility collapse curve since AI can generate unlimited click bait.
Double click will end up killing google, it’s already too late to go back.
...at the end of the day, I'd be happy to see a tax pass, some mix of what you put excellently as "real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away", and I imagine similar to you given your MTV reference, experiencing there wasn't really anything special going on at BigCo. It's plain old economic inefficiency, not poor beleaguered good guy G that's always looking out for news and just trying to organize the world's information.
Journalists aren’t dumb either, talk to anybody who directly got one or was involved in the process.
But there is competition in this space.
The search antitrust suit was garbage, but the coming trials in the ad auction suit is going to hurt a lot more. They total lost their way, it’s actually insane when you’ll see what theyve been doing.
Google never stopped “innovating”, they just shifted their innovation to fraud.
https://adtechexplained.com/google-project-bernanke-explaine...
Alleges quite a bit, yet the main four in the article are.
1) Google says it runs a Second Price auction, but really runs a Third Price auction, ignores the 2nd bid, and takes the difference for (shifting purposes). Telling a Publisher they made $8, when they would have made $12.80.
2) Google inflates bids of buyers "to ensure their advertisers beat out bids from competing buying platforms". Artificially making their platform look better economically. Was individual cases, yet now alleged to be a global pool of stolen Publisher money.
3) Gaining access to Publisher's ad-spend behavior with Dynamic Allocation, and then using the info to make sure rival platforms seemed less competitive by manipulating and inflating other bids. Make sure they always seem to lose by $0.01 on every bid.
4) Forcing Publishers to accept Dynamic Allocation by punishing them with the maximum allowed revenue drop for Bernake (40%) while inflating competitors. Notably Machiavellian that there was a known allowed revenue drop. "We're bein nice, we'll only cut you 25%"
On a slightly different topic, made me wonder how many investment firms artificially lower rates on funds to scrape a bit of profit off the top.
[1] https://texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/... (note, the child-support location is really weird)
That seems an argument for news publishers rolling their own, not against.
What you are allegeding is nasty, but it should also make it easier to build a coompeting service not harder.
It’s impossible to roll your own for a very long list of reasons that go back to the late 90s.
It's not the world/Google that changed.
Advertisers like that.
It's tough to sell them on something else, and essentially impossible to replicate as is.
For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.
They'd rather watch TV, and not even the best TV. If you want the best, you need to pay for Max and Disney and Apple and Amazon and the rest.
Besides, if you actually like to read why would you be buying washington post? People who like to read usually aren't going into 5 minute long shallow articles, they are getting a book on the topic.
Either way, producing quality journalism costs money. And I’m ok paying a reasonable fee for it. :shrug:
I mean, seriously, that's the reason.
Back when newspapers were healthy, basically there was all this stuff that was bundled with the actual news that was of more immediate utility to people: classifieds, movie reviews, comics, coupons. And there was less competition for people's leisure time.
News is now in a very competitive leisure time landscape and is debundled from stuff that's of high value, and most people just don't care that much about news. They'll read it when it's around but they won't pay for it. The ones who are willing to pay for it mostly just subscribe to the New York Times because in a nationalized news environment why not go for the biggest producer.
News provied two services in the old days: access and filtering.
Back in the day you couldn't easily get things straight from the horses mouth, now you can just go to their website.
If you did have direct access in the old days, it was all way too much. There was no way to filter to 10-minutes worth of top goings on. Now a days you can just look at what is upvoted and stop once you have read enough.
I stopped caring about what was happening on the world stage in 2022, and it has been sublime. I hear about the big things from friends and random folks, and it gives some instant conversation starters (“oh no, I hadn’t heard about that”). The only news I actually care about is local news, and I skim the newsletter my (small) city publishes on Fridays.
Given that, there is zero value provided to me by traditional media publishers. I say this as someone who gets NYT, WSJ, WaPo, and FT for free through work. I don’t use them, because I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
No judgement here though—if reading the paper is your thing and you like staying informed, that’s great and I fully support it. Just offering my perspective.
Add to this the introduction of terrible news media. The spam and click bait media, where you get the articles for free but the articles you get are basically worse than what you’d find anywhere else because they are most there to generate revenue from advertising. Stuff that gives “traditional” news media a very bad image. Further add the media platforms which are now straight up political propaganda, which some always where, but now they are owned by very few people and push very divisive agendas which is a little different from the past where they were more inline with each other and the “general” aristocracy rather than a few billionaires/oligarchs and you gain the general media perception even more. Both are rightfully so.
In a sense you get what you pay for though. If you’re not paying you’re not getting quality news. You can see this in Danish news very clearly, where only a handful of news papers still do actual critical journalism and the rest mainly do opinions or click-bait articles on current events that you might as well read on Facebook. Not because Facebook does anything particularly in that department but because the contractors who sell stories and pictures to the “free” news media typically also post their content elsewhere for increased revenue on their part.
As far as going to the “biggest” most “cultural” news media I totally agree with you. In my country people read Weekend Avisen, and then add one of the more politically inclined subscription papers based on their views. But basically it boils down to thee papers, one that is slightly more conservative (which in Scandinavian/American optics would make it almost socialist), one that is left-leaning (again, very socialist in American optics) and one that is based on Christianity (but extremely moderate, as in pro abortion and gay marriage).
Aside from that there are two “localised” papers which either focus heavily on Copenhagen or the part of our country which is called Jylland.
Almost none of these papers would be alive without government subsidies. Because the only two papers which actually makes money are Weekendavisen (our NYT) and the Christian paper which doesn’t actually make money but is subsidised by various Christian groups.
Today, it is just a bunch of people collecting tweets of random people on the interwebs. Race to publish before competition means there's no time for editorial review of simple things like grammar and coherent thoughts let alone accuracy, so lots of FUD can be spread very quickly as "news".
Those well thought out articles are also considered too long and boring and get reposted on socials as TL;DR as if it were their own thoughts.
We used to make fun of the microwave generation with "I want it now" type comments. Now, it's I need it in less than 140chars, or I'm scrolling past it.
The death spiral you describe is like a train wreck that you can do nothing about.
News has become a weird kind of curation market. And the funny thing about this payment arrangement that publishers want is that they are not paying any of those tweeters who may be breaking the news or themselves curating the info.
This was only desired and seen as useful and interesting when people had nothing else to do.
There used to be regional/temporal barriers in place before the Web was popular; newspapers had geographically limited distribution and it took time to print a new edition. One newspaper "scooping" another by one day was all it took to get people to buy the one-day-earlier publication. Also, 20th century newspapers collected significant revenue from classified advertising, people buying the paper just to get a weather forecast, and other kinds of information distribution that really didn't have anything to do with investigative news. The Web unbundled all that (weather.gov, Craigslist, etc.) and the only remaining strength of newspapers was producing original reporting. Which, unfortunately, was never all that profitable on its own even before you get to the "facts are not copyrightable" issue that I mentioned in my first paragraph.
Does anyone have any good pages on that which go into how to extract facts without copyright infringement? And for purposes of creating independent, educational works from those facts?
The end result is reputable news sites became clickbait and eventually people stopped caring.
There is still a market for in depth journalism, and we see a rise in that sort of things. There are plenty of youtube channels doing documentary-like videos on current events. That is journalism.
The journalism that is dying is the stuff concentrating on breaking news. If its shallow its outcompeted by twitter. If its higher quality but still racing to the headline, its outcompeted by wikipedia. The fact is the competitors to breaking news journalism are cheaper and higher quality.
So while you could say a decent chunk of the replacement content is worse than what traditional news outlets could offer, it's at least free and exists by the bucket load, meaning the incentive for paying for it is nonexistent for most of the population. Meanwhile the more niche stuff is both free and done better elsewhere, so RIP anyone making money off that anymore.
To make things tougher, getting advertisers to pay for it is becoming a lost cause too, since again, they can advertise in places where metrics and tracking options are better. They'll get way more bang for their buck on social media than they will trying to market on a news site or in a classifieds section or what not.
Everyone loves reading stories that confirm everything they already know.
Big real news spreads like wildfire, but news as it is consumed is entertainment.
Also, I think traditional newspapers should position themselves so they're not competing with the lowest common denominator of basic info, however due to cutbacks, most newspapers are in essence not doing very much in depth journalism anymore, which means they are unfortunately positioning themselves as competing with any other source of news.
Plenty of independent journalists are out there doing just fine and even some of the big outlets have adjusted effectively. But in the internet age we don't need hundreds of outlets all reporting on the same stories 24/7 - especially when most of those stories have no impact on the viewers/readers.
The market is simply adjusting and the old establishment is going down kicking and screaming.
It's the news sites' content that Google is scraping and monetizing. How is it not Google that's latched on to a "free teat"?
Serious question. What am I missing?
EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes everyone. I need 'em from time-to-time to ensure I've not succumbed to The Matrix.
Of course, you're all wrong. But, keep 'em coming!
I honestly could care less about either of them. I think they should just fight it out on their own and keep our legal system and tax payers time and money out of it.
There's definitely some symbiosis here, but it's ultimately Google that's dependent on the news (and other) sites' content, which it gets for free. That is, the news sites (and other content providers) could exist without Google. But, Google could not exist without their content.
At least that's my observation. So, I wasn't picking a side as much as earnestly asking how OP concluded that its the news sites wanting something free from Google versus the other way around.
Of course, that's the way it is. But, is it a good thing that they've intermediated all of the world's content?
It's easy to argue that the problem is exactly that a relative handful of sites have a monopoly on traffic and, what's more, they've gained that monopoly for free.
30 seconds of serious thought would tell you that your observation is wrong.
Again, a news organization can just change their robots.txt to block google from indexing their site.
They don't do that because that would instantly kill all their search traffic... and most likely kill their business.
If CNN changed their robots.txt to stop being indexed by Google, Google would literally lose 0 users.
> I wasn't picking a side as much as earnestly asking how OP concluded that its the news sites wanting something free from Google versus the other way around.
It's been explained to you several times. Instead you're more interested in acting self-righteous (it's honestly pretty cringeworthy).
Or, maybe I just have a different opinion.
>news organization can just change their robots.txt to block google from indexing their site
You don't seem to have thought beyond this superficial robots.txt "solution". Yes, we all know that option is available. But, as I've self-righteously offered for consideration, Google is one of a few sites that essentially monopolizes traffic generation, so they've positioned themselves to make it untenable for sites to block Google's crawling (and free monetization) of their content.
Cory Doctorow has (another) recent Twitter thread on how tech monopolies have grown virtually unchecked and now abuse the ecosystems in which they operate, increasingly clawing back more value for themselves at the expense of others. IMO this fits the pattern. Look it up. You might find it interesting. Or not.
>They don't do that because that would instantly kill all their search traffic...and most likely kill their business.
And there you've just stated exactly the problem I'm referencing, with apparently zero awareness of how someone could find it problematic. I mean, you just said "they could solve the problem by blocking Google via robots.txt, but that would kill their business".
So, not exactly a solution then, right?
It's baffling that you can say this but still angrily scream that "It's robots.txt! Case closed!"
>It's been explained to you several times. Instead you're more interested in acting self-righteous (it's honestly pretty cringeworthy).
You clearly don't hear yourself. Calm down.
EDIT: out of curiosity, I just took a quick look at your recent comments to others. One of the first to pop up was this:
>What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....?
Lol am I still reading HN or is this Reddit?
Yeah, no self-righteous cringe there.
The news outlet can use robots.txt to prevent indexing. If Google doesn't bring them value, there's the easy answer.
The article is part of the overall content that Google displays in its search results. And, of course, Google monetizes its search results with ads.
Sure, but these things are directly related. It's the scraping that generates the links in question and ultimately earns Google ad revenue. And, if they did pay on the scraping side, then charging for linking would be less relevant. As it is, they're collecting the content, but not paying on either end.
So, it seems if you agree they should pay for the scraping (but they are not), then you wouldn't be opposed to them paying on the other end. In fact, this might be fairer to Google b/c it's pay for performance.
But, more to the point, I was responding to OP's specific-claim that the news sites were attempting to "latch on to a free teat".
Understood. I use the term "scraping" loosely and, admittedly, purposely. I think it's illustrative of the broader point I was attempting to make.
But, if you really want to be precise, what Google actually does is more commonly (and euphemistically) referred to as "crawling". And, it is more accurate to say that they are crawling for the purpose of indexing what they've crawled. Crawling is essentially the front end of an overall process which ends with indexed results.
Whatever the nomenclature you prefer, the effect is the same, and so is my point.
>websites go out of their way to encourage google
I understand that some websites "encourage" Google, and that intersects with the alternative point of view I've been suggesting. That is, that Google is monopolistic in its traffic ownership and the content owners have little choice but to offer their content to be freely monetized by Google. It's also worth pointing out that there are some businesses which are built around SEO from the ground up while others—like news outlets—pre-existed Google but now rely on them to survive. These are different.
To further close the loop, my suggestion was that the original topic of this thread might also be seen as somewhat of a remedy for that effect. And, frankly, it's strange to me that you will allow that Google should be paying sites for their scraping or crawling or whatever, but don't seem to be connecting it to my point, when it really could be viewed as an alternative remedy to the problem I'm describing.
Overall, I believe mine is a more interesting and accurate way to look at the problem than to simply accept that Google has intermediated so many content sites and their consumers as some natural and universally right state of affairs.
In any case, I don't think Google's search business model or that SEO is a thing, etc. is lost on anyone on HN. And, thought I might encounter more interesting discussion here around my view. But it seems most people here have accepted that Google just owns the traffic and everybody must play along. Further, that it's really for their own good. I suppose it's become harder to imagine a world where content producers own their content and are not coerced into giving it away for need of traffic from a single monopolistic source without whom their business might not survive.
But, it's somewhat surprising when I zoom out and think about the spirit of "hacking" and the audience that used to more predominantly frequent HN. Thinking back to staunch support of folks like Aaron Swartz and other topics. Maybe I'm the only one who sees these as somewhere along the same continuum. And that's fine.
Nonetheless, I find this discussion tedious and boring by now, as I'm sure others do my "alternative perspective". So, let's just agree to disagree, rather than have these pedantic restatements of definitions and Google's well-known search business model as if these are somehow dispositive.
Thanks for your time.
Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in the economy?
EDIT: the criteria of zero business relationship between your entire product class and the Big Business is critical; otherwise lots of examples exist.
Walmart is free to ban Google from the premises (robots.txt) or to negotiate an exchange (monetization agreement).
There isn't a single physical product that's not beholden to the Walmarts of the world to stock, market and highlight those products. There isn't a single farmer in this world that isn't dependant on stores buying off their produce and putting it into shelves.
Heck, even in paper era, there wasn't a single paper not beholden to kiosks and other stores to put their papers into racks and into premium places where customers are most likely to pick them up. Do you hink NYTimes demanded that street vendors pay them for the privilege of putting their paper onto a rack?!
Having fully vertically integrated bussiness (like you're mentioning) is a very modern development of monopolies.
In the Google News case, no news sites sells their news to Google News. There is no business relation between Google News or any de jure contact whatsoever between the two. It's different. I am not saying its good or bad, or that this gives the right to the news sites for news sites to demand payments from Google.
But I think its a weird scenario that doesn't occur in other markets. And to understand the pathologies of the online news business, we need to think about this particular no-relations fact.
Going back not as far, CNN was dependent on your local cable company to deliver their signal to homes. Charter or Comcast could choose to stop carrying a channel altogether.
Manufacturers and Retailers
There are lots of examples of people who produce things being beholden to a few companies that controls the distribution channels.
A more interesting one is small businesses and payment processors which don't control the distribution but rather keep them operationally dependant on a product they control a monopoly over.
Yelp.
TripAdvisor.
Also, any business whose livelihood depends on a large company's platform. Businesses and entrepreneurs selling their work on Amazon and eBay, YouTubers and Twitch streamers making content for those platforms, influencers in general given their reliance on social media services...
If I have a product page on Facebook, I have a contract with Facebook. Facebook could choose to end that contract with me and close my account. But Google News blocking/downranking a news site does not involve any contract ending between Google News and the news site. If I don't have a product page on Facebook, Facebook could still choose to block/downrank posts where users on their own free will mention my product. But I don't think this really happens at any significant scale yet.
Same applies your Amazon/Ebay/Youtube/Twitch examples.
No matter how hard you try to avoid it, some asshole will always post any video you make to YouTube immediately and probably try to monetize it.
Given how much money Google collects for YouTube, they should get fined through the roof when they allow somebody to upload something they don't have the rights to.
The porn companies showed that you solve this technically. However, Google will fight this to the very end.
Does it? If I summarize a book, do I need to pay a fee? News (much like recipes) is not directly covered by copyright (facts cannot be copyrighted). Only the expression (exact wording) is (which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story).
I see this claimed often but it doesn't make any sense - anyone can still copy the recipe without the story and then the copy would even provide more value than the original.
Seems to me padding recipes with fluff is mostly about SEO and maximizing ad impressions.
On the contrary, it's the for-profit content creators and to a much bigger extend the monetizing platforms that have latched on to the open web and are now trying to redefine it. Meanwhile, most content is still created by users like you and me who are not going to get any of the ad profits these platforms are crying about.
Google has been at the helm of the web for at least 15 years. “Before Google came along” was before the consolidation of the internet. Google consolidated the internet behind Search, their browser, SEO, even Amp pages (remember that dumpster fire? So open, right?), as they slowly tolled more and more of the internet, while keeping traffic flowing to their advertisers.
Content creators are entitled to a cut of the profits that Google makes from selling ads while presenting their content. I hope this law passes and every other state follows suit.
I remember the internet before Google. There were lots of ads. It was great watching animated GIF ads load at 56 Kbps. There were pop-up adds and crazy obnoxious flashing ads and NSFW ads. Google didn't create all of that: the ad-sphere was alive and kicking long before anyone heard of Google.
I never said they did. Hell, print publications were nearly as bad as the internet has become—marketing is simply a large societal problem we have no solution for. I still place the blame for lack of other funding models squarely on them—any other funding model would have undercut their entire existence, and no other company has had such a profound impact on the web (particularly with the demise of netscape).
No, they bought it in the form of Doubleclick, and its profits supported the rest of their money-losing business. If buying Doubleclick doesn't make you responsible for Doubleclick, I don't know what does.
People wouldn't tolerate the level of online ad blight we had 20 years ago, there are ad-blockers now; the reason Google isn't going buckwild with ads is because it can't.
_Neither_ are deserving of fair-use protections.
https://support.google.com/googlenews/thread/2165411/how-do-...
But publishers’ collective frustration with Google is quite high. Given the implications that “it would be a shame if something happened to your nice journalism website” coupled with the appeal against the big bad hedge funds and ghost papers, it’s sort of a clever position but I’m not sure it will work.
News is a strange product, and one that I think a lot of people in tech get wrong. The atomic unit of journalism is not an article....it's the reporting. Even deciding to write an article is an act based on the analysis of the reporting.
Further, a good headline often tells the story itself -- and that is implicitly included when we talk about links. How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link? Probably a bunch. But you still know OJ died, or the bridge in Baltimore collapsed, etc, etc. That level of reporting, the confirmation that it happened, all that stuff -- all was expensive, all required labor and other resources.
So -- from the consumer perspective, what happens? You get clickbait. The publishers have to recoup the expenses somehow, and they need you to click through to show you ads, or a paywall. "This item in your cabinet could kill you!" Or, they cover the site with ads, hoping to get as much out of the few clicks they get.
I am not saying this in support of the CJPA, nor in support of Google. Just saying this is an existential crisis that came from the simple act of aggregation.
(Disclaimer/shameless plug: I'm a former journalist building https://www.forth.news, a social-media like news feed for reading news. While we are not there yet, our goal is to be able to revshare with the reporters/newsrooms who write the stories to be able to monetize those headlines.)
Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
In the end, people choose to do open source knowing that they're not going to get much money out of it.
My point is simply that this is more than just linking. It's a full-on parasitic relationship, where Google (and Meta, and others) take the reporting that others are doing and build their own traffic off of that, while draining the people doing the work dry. News orgs are then faced with a terrible choice -- cut off the source of traffic or give it away for free. That's different than a dev deciding to open source a project.
The business model of links + ads is going to be more in peril in the future than it is today, regardless of the regulatory environment. We see the problem all over media: If you are relying on google to give you traffic, your content better be really cheap and SEO'd to death, or be a funnel where most content is hidden, trying to drive people into subscriptions. Agglomeration in the traffic driving and ad spaces leads to them taking most of the profit unless there's agglomeration on the other end. Just like in American healthcare, more people using the same insurance companies that try to drag reimbursement rates down is met by hospital networks gobbling up practices and pharmacies, as to get market power that the insurer cannot ignore. So we'll see situations where, say, Google and the NYT have to decide whether the search traffic is worth it, and what's the right price for letting the latest AI ingest the entire contents of the Times.
It's not about moral good or bad, but about how incentive structures leave us with few viable economic models. Both software engineers and journalists will change behavior to make more money.
Search engines and social networks don't owe sites they link or their users link to any traffic. It would be silly to be like, "it's only copyright infringement if users don't click through the link enough."
I do think there should be some laws around funding certain open source software that has become critical to the functioning of society -- whether or not that's paid by tax payers in general, or by the companies using that software is a different question though.
Government funded open source strikes me as something that can very much make sense, in certain cases. Some software very much operates at utility scale, and yet, doesn't have a funding model beyond the good will of volunteers. This is dangerous, and also the type of situation that the government exists to solve.
So, yes, companies probably should pay for at least some open source software, maybe indirectly through tax, maybe through some other mechanism.
I think that would be an amazing law, actually.
A quasi-tax that affects everyone and helps fund public goods is easy to get my support.
But taxing specifically linking by a couple companies is not good.
A headline has always been an attempt to sell an article access to headlines and has a long history of freely accessible for this reason. Publishers WANT links to their article to use their headlines because that is how the articles are sold.
You talk about the 'atomic unit of journalism' being reporting... but that isn't really a meaningful assertion. What is meaningful is that facts are not copyrightable (which is good.) If you are selling access to facts as your product, you have to differentiate yourself on either storytelling, curation or speed.
Notably, the California law covers all links, not just those that include a summary or headline.
I don't think the crisis has anything to do with aggregation. I think the crisis has to do with how money is spent on advertising, how much of that money Google is able to extract via their monopoly, and the degree to which we've allowed capital markets to gut such a vital institution. I think the EFF report linked in the article does a much better job of breaking down the issue, even if I don't agree with every recommendation it makes or think they are sufficient.
My point is that sharing links is a double edged sword that was sort of forced on the news publishers. They've grown dependent on the traffic -- and agreed, they need a different business model -- but thats tough when anyone else can undercut you and publish for free, and then compete for that same traffic.
Also, if you think you can differentiate on curation or speed, you cannot, because those same links will appear regardless.
And yes, the advertising monopoly is a huge part of this -- but the argument has always been that the search engines need news just as much as news needs search engines. But they've set up the situation in a way that they have all the leverage.
What are you talking about? "sharing links" was not forced on publishers by anyone, not even sort of. Sharable links to content are not in any way damaging, so can't be a double edged sword. Sharable links are purely beneficial and you have done zero of the work to show otherwise.
Somewhat related - I have clicked a lot more on Axios articles which I know are 2-5 minute reads, compared to other long form articles where the author wanted to write a novella. Infact I look forward to reading Axios articles which I know are well written, compared to others which are of varying quality, so less inclination to click.
How often did the news service that published that headline also break the story vs acquired it from AP or another wire service?
I pay for NYT, WSJ and local news because I want news companies to exist. But news companies have a huge anti-tech bias (because they compete for ad revenue). NYT explicitly had a "no good news on tech" policy for a while (still?). There is a missing business model for news because it's hard to monetize, and information is free. Society should figure this out, and establish its values - but trying to pretend that google search results (or Facebook posts) are the evil villain killing news instead of the free movement of information on the internet at large is naive.
This is their method of side-channeling an "unfair" deal. If they actually wanted a fair negotiation they would just go to Google directly and say "we will opt out of indexing unless you pay us $X". But they think they can get more money by lobbying a law to force Google to accept a better deal.
So, what's different now?
Also:
California Assembly votes to pass the Journalism Preservation Act - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36165322 - June 2023 (99 comments)
Facebook and Instagram owner Meta threatens to cut off news in California - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36148877 - June 2023 (27 comments)
Can the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act preserve local journalism? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27943976 - July 2021 (1 comment)
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-news-re-opens-spai...
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...
No link tax, just a tax for news.
Sounds... reasonable?
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.
Not sure where you're getting your information.
It's like calling armed robbery by a cop under official orders by the president a private deal. Not a thing.
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.
Bills like this are like copyright law on steroids, making copyright holders even more powerful than they already are.
Cass Sunstein is a pioneer.
>Oh, you posted this story we really didn't like. Sorry, this month's check got lost in the mail. We'll sort it out in 6-15 business days.
Businesses eventually become reliant on significant revenue streams which gives the party that provides them power over the business.
It might not even be Google doing anything nefarious, just a case of "sorry, but our business is doing poorly and we might have to shut down Google News and stop paying if this keeps up."
The liberal party is now out of power but the labor party has no courage to stand up to Murdoch to repeal this.
It was all very clever and basically a way to fund right wing media in Australia via big tech. Blatantly corrupt as fuck and people need to be arrested for what went on to create this law but definitely clever.
Impressive it was done, and absolutely insane.
If google decides to delist, forcing them to list news sites would constitute compelled speech, would it not?
However, it seems to at least be a common belief that US free speech laws are often interpreted more broadly than free speech laws in several other countries. Moreover, compelled speech (as noted by the commenter) seems not unrelated here. For instance, see the somewhat recent Colorado web designer case [1].
[1] https://www.cpr.org/2023/06/30/supreme-court-303-creative-ca...
I'd be happy if the entire goggle corps left California: take my monopoly, please...
Google acknowledges they had a part to play in causing the collapse of journalism but has no solutions to offer.
People aren't consuming news, and when they do they choose the least accurate, most entertaining sources for it. Newspapers and local broadcasters are suffering because the public has lost the will or the capacity to focus. When will we start seeing white box Surgeon General warnings on Tiktok and Youtube that remind the user prolonged exposure can cause serious mental health issues? [1] Where's the DARE school-visit campaigns to remind kids that broadcast news is free over the air and their parents are chumps for paying streaming services' subscription fees?
[1]: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/23/surgeon-general-is...
We won't (or if we do they won't accomplish anything), because once you've moved to a low-trust society, which we are rapidly doing, any official statements telling you which information to consume/avoid are seen as Enemy Action and make you trust your outside sources even harder. You can find tons of Zoomers saying they get news from Tiktok specifically because it's not under the control of The Man (even though it's controlled by the Chinese government, the ultimate The Man). There are no easy fixes here.
But more than this, the big tech companies are just too powerful and their mere existence is anti competitive. I think that issue needs to be addressed independent of media outlets specifically. For example with AI, big tech companies are in a position to put themselves first in front of customers and prevent any smaller players from competing for users and market share. Now Apple and Microsoft are forcing their AI agents onto phones and computers, and potentially violating privacy of users and using all their data for training or other purposes. We’ve seen such a long history of anti competitive practices from these companies, and rather than dealing with performative court cases that drag out for years, we need to deal with the fact that they’re too big. They need to be split up. Or maybe just get taxed more compared to everyone else.
This has already been the case for >10 years.
Anyone can ask to be removed from the index. The internet is old enough that it has long been standard that search is opt out, when you are part of the World Wide Web.
If seeing the headline and maybe a tiny fragment of the first words is enough to remove commercial viability, there's a lot of things that do that. Physical newspapers/magazines are generally displayed in a way that provides that information, for instance.
I'm sure there are people who search, see the headline, and don't click through. But the counterargument is that other people do click through, and without the search results then the news website wouldn't have received any of that traffic.
Perhaps-ironically, it looks like a full AI-synthesis approach would be a way to get around paying the news orgs under this law. If the Google results just give a synthesized blend of news from across the web without linking to anything in particular...
Heck, that's what twitter is great at. If there's a news story, you can get the gist pretty quickly on there.
But, anything beyond a link starts to open up questions for me.
Who even uses Google's AI summarize feature for articles? For me, most of the time it's been because the pop-up for it jumped in the way for me and it was an accidental click. When I have intentionally used it, it's been a pretty poor summary and misses key nuances that make the article unique compared to other publishers.
Taking a step back further, I don't know who is asking for this feature. What's the target market here?
Also, perhaps I'm wrong here but I don't think anyone would want an AI summarized version of other types of media like songs or movies.
I disagree, a "link tax" is the wrong choice of response, and incredibly dangerous to a free/distributed internet: Once it exists in principle its scope will not remain limited to affecting only big unsympathetic search-engine companies, it'll start affecting other sites (like, say, HN) and get abused to deter critics from pointing to the things they want to criticize.
If any source-page with a link is "summarizing" way too much about the destination... well, then there's already a mechanism for that: "Sue them for copyright infringement."
Right now things like titles and brief summaries and whatnot are clearly fair-use, but that's not guaranteed to be a defense against some future "you can't directly point at my page" law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...