To be fair, there were a few positive/neutral articles, for example by Frank Rieger, a popular member of the Chaos Computer Club, in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) but they are in the minority.
Of course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like: "robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some time back regarding internet filters. But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists. I applaud google for their efforts (and I am fully aware of their commercial interests in this matter) but I slowly begin to think they did their cause a disservice. If a discussion takes place its always about google and their lobbying. The extend of this law which could lead to bloggers being sued (btw: a side effect of the very fuzzy written law which leaves a lot open and almost certainly will need a court to decide on the details) when they link to news articles is almost never mentioned.
One last thing: Recently, two big news newspapers had to shut down and that print sales are declining is nothing new. I cant remember the last time I bought a newspaper and I am also pretty sure that although blogs/twitter/whatever are a good addition they cant replace classical media. There is definately a need for the discussion for new sources of incomes for classical paper based medias as ad sales from their online publication wont cut it. Perhaps something like a "culture/media tax/flatrate" as we currently have with the GEZ (for the financing of the public tv stations)? I dont know, but the #lsr is certainly not the way to go.
"But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists."
Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in ways that are necessarily positive. There is far less incentive to be a good journalist now since the quality of a given article is likely much lower than in the past -- research is more limited, articles are written in a greater hurry, even some articles these days are largely written by computer or by individuals overseas.
What this law is reasonably trying to address is that content of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. Surely enforcing that value with an iron fist like the RIAA is not the right way to go. But allowing free expropriation (even of abstracts) may also be unfair.
I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6. Surely such a thing would not have been possible fifty years ago, but something similar is possible today with the advent of the internet. If this behavior had occurred fifty years ago and hadn't been regulated, imagine what would have happened: the overall quality of newspapers would have been diluted and the incentive to produce good articles would have likely declined.
Now, of course, this isn't quite perfect. Again, Google is borrowing very small snippets. And surely -- if anyone remembers this -- the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google? Over time, the fees could certainly accrue. The question, I think, is how high these fees are and how this sort of regulation is imposed.
I think the problem here is that this goes against the basic premise of the web itself and hypermedia. What about my blog where I post the (in my opinion) most important news of the day and link to the sources. Okay, those links are manually curated. What if I write a script that automatically posts (tweets?) all the articles I visit. Ok I am not a search engine but where do you draw the line? My point is that this is very hard to define and write down as a law.
Is a discussion necessary? Absolutely. Do we need a strong press? You bet your ass we do. Do we perhaps need to restructure the current model and fund the fourth power? Yeah, I dont know. Is this the way? Certainly not.
But I think this is only another symptom of a trend currently manifestating where people with ties and no insight into the matter try to control and profit from a medium they are just beginning to understand. The ITU conference, this guy in the UK who wanted to sue everyoneone retweeting an article,....
[C]ontent of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized.
I don't buy the assertion of inherent value. There's a ton of crap out there.
If there's any value in content it's subjective, not inherent.
People who are so convinced of the value of their content are free to erect a paywall and rake in the cash.
But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google?
It' perhaps something to consider, but it has to be a consensual act, where the value is negotiated. Google may already be providing commensurate value by driving traffic to a site.
> If it had zero value why would Google be interested in it?
Again, value is subjective. Even if you think it has zero value, even if every engineer at Google thinks it has zero value, it might have value to someone out there. If nothing else, it could be a part of a corpus linguistics study.
Google's value is in its comprehensiveness. Both the marginal value and cost to maintain a single piece of content in their index is extremely close to zero.
the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google?
I don't understand the distinction you are making between these two situations.
Think about the larger precedent that you're setting here, however. Should I not be able to quote a few lines and link you to a news story without paying money to the source I'm linking to? (whether the license was compulsory or not). What is google news but a factual stating of "here's what a bunch of sources said about the news today"? If a major event happens in your home town, how much money will it cost you to put up a blog post saying, "here's a roundup of coverage on this event"?
Just for the record, French laws about "droits d'auteurs" and quotations allow you to quote any text under "droits d'auteur" as long as it remains a quotation (the definition of which is vague, and varies from one case of "jurisprudence" to another, but 300 words is generally considered reasonable)
This sortof is an essential preamble to free speech. Now, i agree with you, there's "quote" and there's "quote".
> I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6.
Newspapers and newsmagazines have always been very mercenary/cavalier about this sort of thing. Especially pre-web but even today, newspapers routinely rewrite stories from competing papers without even the slightest mention of where they got that information, radio shows discuss today's print headlines and read excerpts, readers' digests (e.g. The Week) pay no license fees for the stories they summarize and it's an old lament in newsrooms that local TV news just copies whatever's in the paper that day.
By comparison, an aggregator that pulls headlines from news sites and links them back to the original content seems rather innocuous.
(Of course, I don't intend to argue that because journalists steal, aggregators shouldn't feel bad about stealing either. But it puts things into perspective. And if headlines and links aren't fair use I don't know what is.)
> Recently, two big news newspapers had to shut down and that print sales are declining is nothing new. I cant remember the last time I bought a newspaper and I am also pretty sure that although blogs/twitter/whatever are a good addition they cant replace classical media. There is definately a need for the discussion for new sources of incomes for classical paper based medias as ad sales from their online publication wont cut it.
... I like Clay Shirky's comment:
> Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
and
The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
Well, if we're going to miss them when they're gone, then we should figure out a goddamned way to replace it, rather than saying, "The Internet is just too much revolution for you to handle, man."
Full-time investigative journalism cannot go away, for the sake of society. It's a matter of how we will continue it, or what model and best practices will supplant it. iReport doesn't count.
I'm not sure we are going to miss them when they're gone. The point of Clay's article, as I read it, is that's their argument.
In reality, I agree with Clay (and you, I think), which is to say that it isn't newpapers we might miss, but solid journalism. The interesting question is whether these are indpendent variables. I.e. could we have newspapers without good journalism and good journalism without newspapers.
I think a good case can be made that journalism has been declining for years, irrespective of the effect of the internet.
I also think it's quite possible we may end up with good journalism and no newspapers. I don't think wikileaks is the answer, for example, but such an organisation couldn't exist twenty years ago. I think we'll see a lot more attempts to create a 21st century journalism model before one sticks.
It won't go away it'll be replaced by other things. It already is. People get more news faster from voices on the ground in events like the Arab Spring than they ever did from a newspaper. So for immediacy other avenues are arising.
Newspapers and media companies, have had no problem killing off their news departments in the name of profits - eliminating foreign desks, reducing investigative reporting, focusing on lifestyle reportage and opinion pieces.
High quality opinion writers are finding success as bloggers - some are able to make a perfectly good living as such. They don't need the label of a newspaper to sit beneath any more.
There will always be outlets for investigative journalism. There will always be some form of news show and publication. Advertisers gain a certain value from placing their ads alongside high quality news content. Just not enough to support billions of dollars of newspaper revenue.
If the commercial radio and TV stations disappeared from the Bay Area we'd still have NPR - a high quality news alternative. Why? Because there are a certain number of people always prepared to pay something for high quality content.
Long way of saying I think you're right - we'll end up with good journalism and no newspapers.
> The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
In case you collect logical fallacies, this is a wonderful example of "Argument from adverse consequences":
A
But A leads to B, and B is bad
Therefore, Not A
This is reasonable if you're deciding whether to pursue A as a course of action, but it is idiotic if you're trying to decide whether A is true or not. A will be true or false regardless of whether you like what it leads to.
Isn't the problem here that the benefit is not directly visible? Same reason there is still no global agreement on a proceeding against global warming. There is no doubt that you need a functioning, diverse and independent press for a functioning democracy. So indirectly everyone (corporations as well) benefits from this institution.
In germany we have a couple public tv stations which are financed through a fee everyone owning a tv must pay, regardless if they watch those channels or not. They arent bound to a viewing quota, are independet from the government and have an educational mandate.
Well, at least in theory: In practice huge amounts of money are just wasted by a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, politicians and the church have a saying in the content and the stuff shown is becoming more and more like the crap on private tv stations.
I think something like this could be a viable solutions. But implementing it, especially the algorithm which decides who gets how much is very hard if not impossible. To much attack surface for illegitimate interventions.
edit: typed that comment before I had time to view your link. great read. Never really thought about the "save newspapers vs save journalists vs save society" aspect.
You appear to be arguing that we should subsidize businesses for which the market rate for their product is virtually zero. The idea that what's in the interests of big media companies and their owners is somehow in the interests of the creative talent (think - do musicians outside a tiny number of stars have any negotiating position with record giants?) and that that is in turn somehow in the interests of society just doesn't follow for me. Every industry that fails makes the same argument - the public should pay to save us (and you are paying if as a Google customer you are forced to have your services restricted because Google has to pay to subsidize these failed businesses). But just as the piano sheet music industry was successfully replaced by the recording industry, new industries rise and replace old ones and meet the demands of the market. Just because we cannot see what that future is - because if we could we'd be building it and be billionaires doing so - doesn't mean it won't happen.
Twitter's coverage of the Arab Spring was better than any Western media in the early days... food for thought.
>Twitter's coverage of the Arab Spring was better than any Western media in the early days... food for thought.
I would disagree. First of all, my parents dont know how to use twitter. But lets say thats just a generational problem which will solve itself over time. There is still another issue:
The signal to noise ratio on twitter is very low. To get a good information on, lets say the arab spring, I have to spend quite some time digging through many tweets to distill the relevant information. A not dismissible overhead. And even if I managed to find out all relevant tweets and managed to form a coherent image from those splinters of information (which could be hard because I may be missing relevant background information) I still dont know if I based my model on legitimate sources. Regimes knows just as well which power lies in the social media and are eager to spread false information and propaganda.
Of course, false information is a problem also existent with classical journalism, but to a much lesser degree. They build their reputation as a reliable source of information (especially abroad in very intransparent situations like the arab spring) over many years with a network of trusted correspondents.
Thats something which is very difficult to replace with social news mechanisms.
Tell folks who read the NYT in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, or people who watch Fox News - or any of the US mainstream media - that the traditional media has less misinformation.
Good point. I didnt say they were free from misinformation. Just that I know I can trust eyewitness reports from international correspondents more than I can trust a random twitter account.
To tackle the problem you describe its important to encourage critical thinking and to not rely on one newssource. And we need investigative journalists. And whistleblower. And social media. And luck.
Its very hard to counter governmental lies on such a big scale.
I hear what you're saying. I don't necessarily disagree fundamentally, but I do think most of these arguments about the news media revolve around the myth of the noble scrappy reporter fighting for the truth and the gritty editor who backs him against interference from above, and the owner that pulls for them both to succeed. I think that Hollywood version just no linger exists if it ever did. Media companies and their owners care about generating profits and the power and influence they get from controlling the picture of reality try masses get. The people who work in them seldom represent their platonic ideal any better. Most will write whatever pays them the best or assists their move up the media food chain - watch them abandon all pretense of principle when they get the TV gig!
After last few years here in Poland I've stopped believing in good reporting. No matter what you say, press is going to present it the way it wants, and it's impossible to break the glass and say to public what you really want. If there's order to show you're stupid, you will look stupid, no matter what you say. If there's order to show you're great - you will look and sound great.
I wish traditional massmedia fast demise. There's nothing there worth saving at this point.
I'm very curious to know how they would determine how much Google should pay, and how to distribute that money to the different publishers.
Anyway, I think that Google, if the law is passed, should refuse to pay and stop publishing news from publishers from Germany (there are always still Austrian and Swiss newspapers for German news).
Of course the quality and quantity of German news on Google would worsen, but the point would be to see if it is Google benefiting more from the newspapers, or the other way around.
It would be interesting to see an official statistic from the big papers where they get their traffic from. I get my news by surfing directly to their homepages. I think I read somewhere that they get most of their hits through the google search although I cant really belive that.
I would imagine the bulk of traffic comes from headline news. Some people check the paper every day, some people catch a bit of news on the bus or TV or whatever, then google it.
I think the rest of the traffic historical articles, looked up by people trying to win arguments on the internet. I don't know how many times i've been pulled to the NYT because of that sort of behavior. I would guess all of that traffic comes from google.
Could newspapers actively allow search engines etc. to quote them? I am thinking of heise when I say this, one of the few utterly "good guys" where "we won't sue, you can trust us" would actually work.
Or would this law mean the state attorney can simply sue Google et al, regardless of the stance of the supposed victim?
IANAL but I think this doesnt fall under the responsibility of the state attorney since it isnt part of the "strafrecht"/criminal law. I guess the process would be comparable to how copyright violations are currently handled.
Oh, so I would assume without anyone to sue, there'd be no case? If that is correct, I would predict if these publishers get their way, those that make use of the law would paint themselves into a corner. So it's not just about protecting our interwebs, but also about protecting them from their own stupidity ^^
Sure, and I would welcome that. But I think smaller publishers (including bloggers) might have problems, too. The law would apply to their blogs as well, they would have to figure out how to allow Google and others to still quote them. It might be so complicated that it would cause a lot of blogs to shut down.
Other news processors were already mentioned in the article. I just fear that it would make it too costly to experiment and would kill small publishers.
Would it work to just put your blog under a permissive distribution license (Creative Commons or the like)? I know nothing about the German legal system or the exact phrasing of this law; could someone with more domain knowledge comment on how this would interact with licensing terms?
I don't know the exact phrasing either. Also not sure if everybody wants to put their content under CC.
I think the government could make this messy enough to even foil the CC plan. For example they could set it up like GEMA for music - there would be an entity distributing the money and collecting it on behalf of the content providers. Besides, is there a standard way yet to announce CC content? That would be necessary to make it work for search engines.
And then when your blog quotes or links to some other site (let's face it, a huge amount of blogging is discussion of news stories ...)? - they can't put that under CC and they might even be asked to pay for the privilege of linking to the story - they basically get hit both ways.
No. When a site is down, it is customary on Hacker News for someone to go to Google and get the last cached (saved) version of the web-page from them to post it those that can't access it to read, as a sort of convenience. It's also common for the plaintext of the article to be posted here.
As this site is nearly down, I add my thoughts as a comment here as well:
Well, some media (FAZ) did a pretty good job, letting Frank Rieger explain the "Leistungsschutzrecht". OK, even there, it was one article of many. And only one.
And what is new, when it comes to the press not publishing anything, that goes against their own agenda. Even across a lot of publishing-houses. Well nothing new under the sun.
What is really, really bad, is the fact, that the law is so fuzzy, that everyone quoting from another source might be potentially liable. This law is so bad, because it just might kill the independent voices. And I think there might be a reason for this.
Because the press oftentimes has no incentive to dig deeper, to ask critical questions, when it comes to the really important questions, this job is left for the independent voices, that do this out of a feeling of necessity. But if these voices are silenced through fear...
... well, I think you get the drift. And I know, this sounds a lot like conspiracy - and I am not saying, my thoughts come anywhere near the truth, but I just wanted to share the thought.
Just one example: The so called "Netzsperren" (blocking sites, because of content with filter-lists - aka censorship) were reported by the big media as being bad, after a lot of independent bloggers had written about it and the discussion just could not be "ignored" any longer.
Some have argued that even just linking to an article might get you sued. After all, most URLs include the title of the article. Obviously, courts will have to decide, but the possibility alone is frightening.
Some years ago here in Germany there has been an court sentence, that a link is no infringement. >The publishers wanted to kill Google News in this way.
Some years before that a friend of mine had written a news search engine, that did exactly the same as Google News, but he did not have the money to fight before court. So he had to remove a lot of publishers from his index.
So I do not think, that linking will become a problem here - but who knows. But the real problem is, that this law might silence independent bloggers. And it was them, who brought important topics into the public discussions, that were ignored by the big publishers, like a planned web-censorship law, that was discussed some years back...
This is entirely misleading, because it makes it seem like the policies in other countries is questionable with regards to fair use, or perhaps with lesser rights.
In France, for example, there is no such thing as fair use, but that's only because 'fair use' in the US is not defined as what you're allowed to do, however, but as a sort of vague statement about perhaps being able to use things.
In France, it is strictly codified:
You are able to make private showings of copyrighted material
You are allowed to make private copies (with a few exceptions, e.g. software backups allowed, but copying your poster so you can hang it in two different rooms is illegal, as is copying your software to two different computers so two different people can use it)
You can make copies of non-educational works for educational uses (ie. no photocopying textbooks, but you can copy yesterday's newspaper article all you want)
Parody
Citations
Etc.
"What’s wrong with newspapers being paid for the content that they produce? No one has to use their headlines if they don’t want to pay for it."
What about fair use? Does that exist in Germany? I'm a quote geek for example. I love collecting "favourite quotes", giving a source (link if possible). I started out with the general quotes everybody knows, but of course I also copy and paste from the web in general, and sometimes I actually type what I read in a book, and translate it to English. Man, I even love talking about it. I love quotes.
Now, I consider that "fair use", and since I do it mostly in English the noobs left me alone so far. But I don't even know if there is such a thing as fair use in Germany... any ideas?
There is the "Zitatrecht" (quotation right), which allows you to quote short excerpts, provided they accurately represent the original text and you acknowledge the source.
But unlike in the US this is only valid for texts, not for other copyrighted material like movies. ( This means that youtube remixes are most likely illegal in germany.)
Isn't this a case for the internet bat signal? I must admit I still haven't included it on my sites, mostly because last time I looked they only provided JavaScript hooks making my site vulnerable to their site being hacked. Perhaps they have an API by now?
Interesting and sad. I don't know if it is possible but I am wondering if such a law could include an 'opt out' policy. Something which said to search engines and the like that they are allowed to snippet your articles.
Then have Google turn off indexing of everything that doesn't have opt-out enabled.
My expectation would be that the opt-out publications would flourish and the ones who had opted "in" would quickly die or decide to join the "opt out" group. I can't imagine anyone looking at their referrer links would think this scheme was a "good" idea.
Well I can only read English transcribed interpretations so perhaps a native German speaker can correct me.
As I understand it this is their argument:
Google crawls site X, a user visits Google News or Google Search, Google displays a page which has extracted content from site X as a link (usually the headline) and a "snippet" of what that title is referring to. Google also has advertisements on the page.
Now, as I understand their argument, The publishers claim Google makes money off someone who clicks on an advertisement on these 'constructed' pages. Google's news page is full of headlines and snippets that came from other publications. Google doesn't pay those publications, but the only "reason" that someone is reading the news page in the first place is because those headlines and snippets are on that page. Therefore Google should either share any revenue they got from the ad click with the people whose 'content' was on the page, or they should pre-pay for that content in the first place.
Does that seem like it captures it? If you agree that it does, then we can speculate that the publishers lobbying for this 'law' believe that in this economic transaction Google is getting a better deal than they are.
Except that they conveniently ignore the economic benefit they are getting from Google for telling the world that their web site has interesting content (or at least content related to the news interest or search interest of the web searcher).
Presumably these publishers make income either through sales or advertising on their web site. And those sales are proportional to the traffic at their web site. Google could charge to include them in their search/news results (and they in fact do that in search with AdWords) and would it be more or less than the papers would charge to use a snippet?
The easiest way to educate a publisher on the value of having their results appear in Google is to stop having them appear in Google. Ask any web site that was knocked off the first page by the Panda update how that feels. Those guys really "get" the value they receive by being up there. Publishers don't get that yet. (well not all of them). So Google stops indexing them. Their traffic goes back to pre-1995 levels (which means nobody goes there) and their internet costs (hosting, etc) now exceed the revenue from online advertising. Whoops! Education achieved.
Of course I could be totally off base here, there could be some moral argument I'm missing but frankly I think its all about the money here and not all of the 'value' is accounted for.
you miss the part where people can read the newspaper online in Google's cache and on Google+ which will exclusively give them money and not the newspaper ..
You get it right, from the parts of the debate I followed this is their main argument - "they display extracts of our texts, and people then don't visit our page but stay on Google News", which is of course unprovable.
(you could get the amount of people clicking through by stopping to list these snippets - the visitors you loose are the visitors that used to click through)
Another thing to add is: Google runs no ads on Google News, so _directly_ they don't make any money using other people's news (indirectly by binding customers etc.)
@ChuckMcM That sounds right, but to entertain another perspective for a second, maybe the point being made is that the amount of power Google has over publishers is unhealthy. The Publishers seem to think that search engines should be fighting for their business, not the other way around. Its hard to tell what such a drastic change in the system could do, but maybe it doesn't have to be bad.
I for one believe that in order to have the most accurate search results, the rankings should be based on content, not money.
"Maybe the point being made is that the amount of power Google has over publishers is unhealthy."
Framing it in an adversarial way may confuse the issue. The #1 challenge for any business is getting customers. When ever a business emerges that has a large influence on customer acquisition, it annoys businesses.
Lets re-frame the debate into one from the last century. In the US the telephone company knew the address and phone number of every business in a city by virtue of providing the service. One of the ways they leveraged that is they would publish a book, called the "Yellow Pages" which listed every Company and their number. Because the information was collected into one place, the it gained economic value (information economics being an interest of mine). It had so much "value" to customers that it was the first place they looked for the phone number of a business. Businesses realized that for generic things like plumbing, locksmiths, auto repair, being at the front of the list was better than being at the end of the list. Since the list was lexicographically sorted you started seeming names like AAA Locksmith, and A1 Plumbing. Hacking the name to be at the front. Then the Phone company decided to offer up "ads" where you could place an add on the same page as the listing, now even if your name was Zlotnicks Plumbing you could put an advertisement on the first page where plumbing started. That got you business. The complaint then was "Since everyone uses the Yellow Pages, I am forced to pay high prices to get an ad in their pages just so that people will know I exist."
By that same logic businesses may end up paying search engines to appear (and they do for Shopping links according to Bing's Scroogled.com web site).
And this comment: "I for one believe that in order to have the most accurate search results, the rankings should be based on content, not money."
I can totally agree with that, but I may internalize that differently that you do. I think that giving a search engine a choice "pay us or don't crawl us" they will simply opt not to crawl. But to understand why that makes sense economically you have to think about how the information involved gets its value. In this case a collection of 99 versions of a news story for 'free' is more valuable than 100 versions of the same news story. And its worth is exactly zero for uninteresting stories.
Well why should it be that way? If I want to get traffic to a new website I have to buy that traffic in - through ads or other mechanisms that cost money. Why should Google not charge them for the traffic they send instead? The value Google brings to the papers is far higher than the value the papers' content brings to Google.
Belgian papers sued Google a few years ago over similar uses of their content. It sort of backfired on them when google stopped crawling their pages. The internet and Google are more powerful than the German print media. http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-a...
I suggest the "careful what you wish for" lesson applies both ways. "Justice" implies that Google can and should get away with a lot of things under threat of removing your content from their index.
I get what you're saying but in this specific instance, Google was right to delete them from news.google and the general index. The newspapers can't have it both ways (pay us to show up on Google News but keep us for free on Google Search).
Since Germany is a populous and wealthy country, Google has a strong commercial interest in not removing German content. It's hard to imagine what nefarious thing Google would force Germany to do this way.
See my comment below, but to recap the point, Publishers don't necessarily understand the value of being listed by Google. Not listing them is both the fastest, and most difficult to argue with, way to educate them as to that value.
But everybody knows this ... Google knows it, we know it, and Google knows we know it.
Google knows that although they could get away with a lot in the short-run, abusing this power would hurt them badly in the long run. They gain huge benefits from being seen as more or less neutral (to the extent possible—some people will never view them that way).
As a result they seem to have been very, very, careful in how they use this power, only wielding it when explicitly ordered to by an authority with power enough to force the issue.
I'm sure the humans at Google are often tempted (who wouldn't be?), but they appear to also be smart enough to resist that temptation...
> AllThingsD reports that Google has now re-indexed newspapers in the Copiepresse group. This is the right move and also a very self-interested one by Google. If it were to “punish” publishers that didn’t want to be included in Google verticals (e.g., News, Places, Shopping) antitrust investigators would use that as evidence against the company.
I wasn't aware of this story, but this is exactly what I would do if I was Google. Hey, you gotta protect yourself cause the next thing you know, the papers will sue for the search results.
I'd take evil to the next step, where I would now charge the papers for listing search results AND news articles.
Why is it that every time that something like this happens, Google is the only tech company that comes forward with a message? Doesn't having a free and open internet benefit any other company?
You have a weird definition of 'blogspam' if using a headline to point to an article you're commenting on qualifies as 'blogspam'. There's nothing in the law (from what I've seen) that says "If you have more than a paragraph of text, this doesn't apply to you" or anything similar to that.
Technology generally finds a way around poorly written laws but I think there is a real underlying problem. Google News has become its own thing now. The headlines, snippets and icons I get from a variety of newspapers is often enough to skim over the day's news and I only click on maybe one or two stories for more in-depth reading. I think a way for Google to charge news sources and for news sources to charge Google both make sense but they have to be developed by willing participants, not by legislators.
FWIW, I've written to my member of parliament [0], expressed my dissatisfaction and asked him to oppose the law. He wrote back saying hat his parliamentary party is already opposing this law but for slightly different reasons: It won't increase the quality of journalism and will just create a flood of lawsuits. Lastly it is far too vaguely phrased as to not have grave side effects.
The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament.
Interestingly, he has a personal axe to grind with Axel Springer AG as he was a big part of the student movement of '68 which was so intensely vilified by said company ("Youth in the street - Germany going down the drain ...").
fuck ströbele ! he voted in favor of the war in afghanistan and yet he still participates in all the peace rallies.
He's just another lying corrupted politician
I would really like to like the pirate party but in their current state they are absolutely unvotable for me. This is one of their core topics but I havent heard anything from them yet. What I have heard is that the youth organizations of almost every party (yeah I know, including the young pirates) have voiced their concerns regardings the lsr.
That does seem strange. Any idea what is happening to them? Are they going through leadership change inside the party or policy change, since that last scandal with one of their female leaders?
People closer to the pirate party might disagree, but from my outside perspective it has much to do with procedural problems the very nature of the party brings with them. They are primarily concerned with themselves. Lets take flat hierarchy goal for example: A good thing in theory which leads to a very tiring process when it comes to making decisions.
On the last big conference for example there was a last minute petition for the further research of time travel. And it has to be discussed. Sure, it was dismissed relatively quickly and it was meant as a joke but those were 30 minutes lost for good.
Apart from that, and this is just my personal opinion, they are missing likable leading figures (a concept they dont really like). Head of the pirates Bernd Schloemer for example is more of a silent leader. One of the most famous pirates Christoph Lauer comes across as rude, uninterested and smug. A social behaviour 101 wouldnt be that bad for some of the members.
the pirate party certainly has some procedural problems. they would probably be the first to admit just that.
But those problems stem from the fact, that they are trying to implement completly new procedures for political assemblies. procedures that take advantage of modern technology instead of just replicating an essentialy unchanged process from the 18th century.
And if they should succeed, it could redefine democracy.
Redistribution of wealth is necessary to a certain extent, to prevent social inequality from growing. This is a fundamental goal of the German social state as defined by the constitution.
If you don't like state controlled redistribution of wealth you should start a revolution or emigrate.
The "extend" to which the German PP wants to redistribute wealth includes a basic income guarantee (without any requirements). Everyone would get X € per month.
Fun fact: They decided that they - as a party - want this, but have no idea how to finance it.
As does Facebook and Google+. If you put a URL into your post it'll download the page and put in the title, a thumbnail picture, and the first sentence or two.
I think our decentralized streams protocol should solve this kind of thing.
Basically RSS with push and access controls. You subscribe to a feed and get pushes / pulls as long as you are paying it. Why isn't there a standard protocol for this on the web?
IANAL but trying to read the law, it seems to be a rather blatant lex google.[1] They specifically state "search engine or similar services" should be prohibited from (in an extreme interpretation) linking to newspapers, if they do not pay. ( The rest of the law is probably just redundant, since it seems to reimplement copyright for a small subset of already copyrighted material.)
Google should state a new policy. We're not going to spend our money on servers and bandwidth indexing and linking to German publishers who won't pay - I guarantee you the value of the traffic they get from Google dwarfs what Google gets back from them in terms of marginal revenue directly attributable to their content. That's the thing about Google. They make tons of money - but given that they're a prime mover of traffic around the Internet they make a damn site more money for other folks - including newspapers.
So Google should charge. Then they can do like the phone companies with termination fees and call it a wash.
Frankly, I can understand the publisher's point, but I'm surprised that they do not seem to see how this could backfire if Google simply stopped crawling their sites.
But what's more: I think if this law became a reality it wouldn't affect my personal web usage at all. News sites are about the only type of website left where I still type in the URL and go to the page directly instead of doing a search.
155 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadOf course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like: "robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some time back regarding internet filters. But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists. I applaud google for their efforts (and I am fully aware of their commercial interests in this matter) but I slowly begin to think they did their cause a disservice. If a discussion takes place its always about google and their lobbying. The extend of this law which could lead to bloggers being sued (btw: a side effect of the very fuzzy written law which leaves a lot open and almost certainly will need a court to decide on the details) when they link to news articles is almost never mentioned.
One last thing: Recently, two big news newspapers had to shut down and that print sales are declining is nothing new. I cant remember the last time I bought a newspaper and I am also pretty sure that although blogs/twitter/whatever are a good addition they cant replace classical media. There is definately a need for the discussion for new sources of incomes for classical paper based medias as ad sales from their online publication wont cut it. Perhaps something like a "culture/media tax/flatrate" as we currently have with the GEZ (for the financing of the public tv stations)? I dont know, but the #lsr is certainly not the way to go.
[1]http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergl...
Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in ways that are necessarily positive. There is far less incentive to be a good journalist now since the quality of a given article is likely much lower than in the past -- research is more limited, articles are written in a greater hurry, even some articles these days are largely written by computer or by individuals overseas.
What this law is reasonably trying to address is that content of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. Surely enforcing that value with an iron fist like the RIAA is not the right way to go. But allowing free expropriation (even of abstracts) may also be unfair.
I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6. Surely such a thing would not have been possible fifty years ago, but something similar is possible today with the advent of the internet. If this behavior had occurred fifty years ago and hadn't been regulated, imagine what would have happened: the overall quality of newspapers would have been diluted and the incentive to produce good articles would have likely declined.
Now, of course, this isn't quite perfect. Again, Google is borrowing very small snippets. And surely -- if anyone remembers this -- the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google? Over time, the fees could certainly accrue. The question, I think, is how high these fees are and how this sort of regulation is imposed.
Is a discussion necessary? Absolutely. Do we need a strong press? You bet your ass we do. Do we perhaps need to restructure the current model and fund the fourth power? Yeah, I dont know. Is this the way? Certainly not.
But I think this is only another symptom of a trend currently manifestating where people with ties and no insight into the matter try to control and profit from a medium they are just beginning to understand. The ITU conference, this guy in the UK who wanted to sue everyoneone retweeting an article,....
I don't buy the assertion of inherent value. There's a ton of crap out there.
If there's any value in content it's subjective, not inherent.
People who are so convinced of the value of their content are free to erect a paywall and rake in the cash.
But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google?
It' perhaps something to consider, but it has to be a consensual act, where the value is negotiated. Google may already be providing commensurate value by driving traffic to a site.
Again, value is subjective. Even if you think it has zero value, even if every engineer at Google thinks it has zero value, it might have value to someone out there. If nothing else, it could be a part of a corpus linguistics study.
I don't understand the distinction you are making between these two situations.
Think about the larger precedent that you're setting here, however. Should I not be able to quote a few lines and link you to a news story without paying money to the source I'm linking to? (whether the license was compulsory or not). What is google news but a factual stating of "here's what a bunch of sources said about the news today"? If a major event happens in your home town, how much money will it cost you to put up a blog post saying, "here's a roundup of coverage on this event"?
This sortof is an essential preamble to free speech. Now, i agree with you, there's "quote" and there's "quote".
Newspapers and newsmagazines have always been very mercenary/cavalier about this sort of thing. Especially pre-web but even today, newspapers routinely rewrite stories from competing papers without even the slightest mention of where they got that information, radio shows discuss today's print headlines and read excerpts, readers' digests (e.g. The Week) pay no license fees for the stories they summarize and it's an old lament in newsrooms that local TV news just copies whatever's in the paper that day.
By comparison, an aggregator that pulls headlines from news sites and links them back to the original content seems rather innocuous.
(Of course, I don't intend to argue that because journalists steal, aggregators shouldn't feel bad about stealing either. But it puts things into perspective. And if headlines and links aren't fair use I don't know what is.)
... I like Clay Shirky's comment:
> Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
and
The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
Full-time investigative journalism cannot go away, for the sake of society. It's a matter of how we will continue it, or what model and best practices will supplant it. iReport doesn't count.
In reality, I agree with Clay (and you, I think), which is to say that it isn't newpapers we might miss, but solid journalism. The interesting question is whether these are indpendent variables. I.e. could we have newspapers without good journalism and good journalism without newspapers.
I think a good case can be made that journalism has been declining for years, irrespective of the effect of the internet.
I also think it's quite possible we may end up with good journalism and no newspapers. I don't think wikileaks is the answer, for example, but such an organisation couldn't exist twenty years ago. I think we'll see a lot more attempts to create a 21st century journalism model before one sticks.
Newspapers and media companies, have had no problem killing off their news departments in the name of profits - eliminating foreign desks, reducing investigative reporting, focusing on lifestyle reportage and opinion pieces.
High quality opinion writers are finding success as bloggers - some are able to make a perfectly good living as such. They don't need the label of a newspaper to sit beneath any more.
There will always be outlets for investigative journalism. There will always be some form of news show and publication. Advertisers gain a certain value from placing their ads alongside high quality news content. Just not enough to support billions of dollars of newspaper revenue.
If the commercial radio and TV stations disappeared from the Bay Area we'd still have NPR - a high quality news alternative. Why? Because there are a certain number of people always prepared to pay something for high quality content.
Long way of saying I think you're right - we'll end up with good journalism and no newspapers.
In case you collect logical fallacies, this is a wonderful example of "Argument from adverse consequences":
A
But A leads to B, and B is bad
Therefore, Not A
This is reasonable if you're deciding whether to pursue A as a course of action, but it is idiotic if you're trying to decide whether A is true or not. A will be true or false regardless of whether you like what it leads to.
In germany we have a couple public tv stations which are financed through a fee everyone owning a tv must pay, regardless if they watch those channels or not. They arent bound to a viewing quota, are independet from the government and have an educational mandate.
Well, at least in theory: In practice huge amounts of money are just wasted by a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, politicians and the church have a saying in the content and the stuff shown is becoming more and more like the crap on private tv stations.
I think something like this could be a viable solutions. But implementing it, especially the algorithm which decides who gets how much is very hard if not impossible. To much attack surface for illegitimate interventions.
edit: typed that comment before I had time to view your link. great read. Never really thought about the "save newspapers vs save journalists vs save society" aspect.
Twitter's coverage of the Arab Spring was better than any Western media in the early days... food for thought.
I would disagree. First of all, my parents dont know how to use twitter. But lets say thats just a generational problem which will solve itself over time. There is still another issue:
The signal to noise ratio on twitter is very low. To get a good information on, lets say the arab spring, I have to spend quite some time digging through many tweets to distill the relevant information. A not dismissible overhead. And even if I managed to find out all relevant tweets and managed to form a coherent image from those splinters of information (which could be hard because I may be missing relevant background information) I still dont know if I based my model on legitimate sources. Regimes knows just as well which power lies in the social media and are eager to spread false information and propaganda.
Of course, false information is a problem also existent with classical journalism, but to a much lesser degree. They build their reputation as a reliable source of information (especially abroad in very intransparent situations like the arab spring) over many years with a network of trusted correspondents.
Thats something which is very difficult to replace with social news mechanisms.
To tackle the problem you describe its important to encourage critical thinking and to not rely on one newssource. And we need investigative journalists. And whistleblower. And social media. And luck.
Its very hard to counter governmental lies on such a big scale.
I wish traditional massmedia fast demise. There's nothing there worth saving at this point.
Anyway, I think that Google, if the law is passed, should refuse to pay and stop publishing news from publishers from Germany (there are always still Austrian and Swiss newspapers for German news).
A german newspaper will always be more detailed and in-depth when it comes to national matters.
I think the rest of the traffic historical articles, looked up by people trying to win arguments on the internet. I don't know how many times i've been pulled to the NYT because of that sort of behavior. I would guess all of that traffic comes from google.
Or would this law mean the state attorney can simply sue Google et al, regardless of the stance of the supposed victim?
Other news processors were already mentioned in the article. I just fear that it would make it too costly to experiment and would kill small publishers.
I think the government could make this messy enough to even foil the CC plan. For example they could set it up like GEMA for music - there would be an entity distributing the money and collecting it on behalf of the content providers. Besides, is there a standard way yet to announce CC content? That would be necessary to make it work for search engines.
Well, some media (FAZ) did a pretty good job, letting Frank Rieger explain the "Leistungsschutzrecht". OK, even there, it was one article of many. And only one.
And what is new, when it comes to the press not publishing anything, that goes against their own agenda. Even across a lot of publishing-houses. Well nothing new under the sun.
What is really, really bad, is the fact, that the law is so fuzzy, that everyone quoting from another source might be potentially liable. This law is so bad, because it just might kill the independent voices. And I think there might be a reason for this.
Because the press oftentimes has no incentive to dig deeper, to ask critical questions, when it comes to the really important questions, this job is left for the independent voices, that do this out of a feeling of necessity. But if these voices are silenced through fear...
... well, I think you get the drift. And I know, this sounds a lot like conspiracy - and I am not saying, my thoughts come anywhere near the truth, but I just wanted to share the thought.
Just one example: The so called "Netzsperren" (blocking sites, because of content with filter-lists - aka censorship) were reported by the big media as being bad, after a lot of independent bloggers had written about it and the discussion just could not be "ignored" any longer.
Some years before that a friend of mine had written a news search engine, that did exactly the same as Google News, but he did not have the money to fight before court. So he had to remove a lot of publishers from his index.
So I do not think, that linking will become a problem here - but who knows. But the real problem is, that this law might silence independent bloggers. And it was them, who brought important topics into the public discussions, that were ignored by the big publishers, like a planned web-censorship law, that was discussed some years back...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationa...
In France, for example, there is no such thing as fair use, but that's only because 'fair use' in the US is not defined as what you're allowed to do, however, but as a sort of vague statement about perhaps being able to use things.
In France, it is strictly codified: You are able to make private showings of copyrighted material You are allowed to make private copies (with a few exceptions, e.g. software backups allowed, but copying your poster so you can hang it in two different rooms is illegal, as is copying your software to two different computers so two different people can use it) You can make copies of non-educational works for educational uses (ie. no photocopying textbooks, but you can copy yesterday's newspaper article all you want) Parody Citations Etc.
"What’s wrong with newspapers being paid for the content that they produce? No one has to use their headlines if they don’t want to pay for it."
What about fair use? Does that exist in Germany? I'm a quote geek for example. I love collecting "favourite quotes", giving a source (link if possible). I started out with the general quotes everybody knows, but of course I also copy and paste from the web in general, and sometimes I actually type what I read in a book, and translate it to English. Man, I even love talking about it. I love quotes.
Now, I consider that "fair use", and since I do it mostly in English the noobs left me alone so far. But I don't even know if there is such a thing as fair use in Germany... any ideas?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883289
But I suppose I really should have refactored the comment out into a top-level comment and linked to it from both. :)
"Taxing times As newspapers’ woes grow, some are lobbying politicians to make Google pay for the news it publishes"
Not necessarily the end of the world (see Brasil) but might not have the intended consequences :
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspap...
Then have Google turn off indexing of everything that doesn't have opt-out enabled.
My expectation would be that the opt-out publications would flourish and the ones who had opted "in" would quickly die or decide to join the "opt out" group. I can't imagine anyone looking at their referrer links would think this scheme was a "good" idea.
As I understand it this is their argument:
Google crawls site X, a user visits Google News or Google Search, Google displays a page which has extracted content from site X as a link (usually the headline) and a "snippet" of what that title is referring to. Google also has advertisements on the page.
Now, as I understand their argument, The publishers claim Google makes money off someone who clicks on an advertisement on these 'constructed' pages. Google's news page is full of headlines and snippets that came from other publications. Google doesn't pay those publications, but the only "reason" that someone is reading the news page in the first place is because those headlines and snippets are on that page. Therefore Google should either share any revenue they got from the ad click with the people whose 'content' was on the page, or they should pre-pay for that content in the first place.
Does that seem like it captures it? If you agree that it does, then we can speculate that the publishers lobbying for this 'law' believe that in this economic transaction Google is getting a better deal than they are.
Except that they conveniently ignore the economic benefit they are getting from Google for telling the world that their web site has interesting content (or at least content related to the news interest or search interest of the web searcher).
Presumably these publishers make income either through sales or advertising on their web site. And those sales are proportional to the traffic at their web site. Google could charge to include them in their search/news results (and they in fact do that in search with AdWords) and would it be more or less than the papers would charge to use a snippet?
The easiest way to educate a publisher on the value of having their results appear in Google is to stop having them appear in Google. Ask any web site that was knocked off the first page by the Panda update how that feels. Those guys really "get" the value they receive by being up there. Publishers don't get that yet. (well not all of them). So Google stops indexing them. Their traffic goes back to pre-1995 levels (which means nobody goes there) and their internet costs (hosting, etc) now exceed the revenue from online advertising. Whoops! Education achieved.
Of course I could be totally off base here, there could be some moral argument I'm missing but frankly I think its all about the money here and not all of the 'value' is accounted for.
(you could get the amount of people clicking through by stopping to list these snippets - the visitors you loose are the visitors that used to click through)
Another thing to add is: Google runs no ads on Google News, so _directly_ they don't make any money using other people's news (indirectly by binding customers etc.)
"Maybe the point being made is that the amount of power Google has over publishers is unhealthy."
Framing it in an adversarial way may confuse the issue. The #1 challenge for any business is getting customers. When ever a business emerges that has a large influence on customer acquisition, it annoys businesses.
Lets re-frame the debate into one from the last century. In the US the telephone company knew the address and phone number of every business in a city by virtue of providing the service. One of the ways they leveraged that is they would publish a book, called the "Yellow Pages" which listed every Company and their number. Because the information was collected into one place, the it gained economic value (information economics being an interest of mine). It had so much "value" to customers that it was the first place they looked for the phone number of a business. Businesses realized that for generic things like plumbing, locksmiths, auto repair, being at the front of the list was better than being at the end of the list. Since the list was lexicographically sorted you started seeming names like AAA Locksmith, and A1 Plumbing. Hacking the name to be at the front. Then the Phone company decided to offer up "ads" where you could place an add on the same page as the listing, now even if your name was Zlotnicks Plumbing you could put an advertisement on the first page where plumbing started. That got you business. The complaint then was "Since everyone uses the Yellow Pages, I am forced to pay high prices to get an ad in their pages just so that people will know I exist."
By that same logic businesses may end up paying search engines to appear (and they do for Shopping links according to Bing's Scroogled.com web site).
And this comment: "I for one believe that in order to have the most accurate search results, the rankings should be based on content, not money."
I can totally agree with that, but I may internalize that differently that you do. I think that giving a search engine a choice "pay us or don't crawl us" they will simply opt not to crawl. But to understand why that makes sense economically you have to think about how the information involved gets its value. In this case a collection of 99 versions of a news story for 'free' is more valuable than 100 versions of the same news story. And its worth is exactly zero for uninteresting stories.
Ok, ok, also a little bit of schadenfreude.
I suggest the "careful what you wish for" lesson applies both ways. "Justice" implies that Google can and should get away with a lot of things under threat of removing your content from their index.
Google knows that although they could get away with a lot in the short-run, abusing this power would hurt them badly in the long run. They gain huge benefits from being seen as more or less neutral (to the extent possible—some people will never view them that way).
As a result they seem to have been very, very, careful in how they use this power, only wielding it when explicitly ordered to by an authority with power enough to force the issue.
I'm sure the humans at Google are often tempted (who wouldn't be?), but they appear to also be smart enough to resist that temptation...
> AllThingsD reports that Google has now re-indexed newspapers in the Copiepresse group. This is the right move and also a very self-interested one by Google. If it were to “punish” publishers that didn’t want to be included in Google verticals (e.g., News, Places, Shopping) antitrust investigators would use that as evidence against the company.
http://searchengineland.com/beligian-newspapers-claim-retali...
I'd take evil to the next step, where I would now charge the papers for listing search results AND news articles.
The law is good because Google can afford to pay and the hordes of blogspammers can't.
Therefore Germany will be the first country without blogspam.
You have a weird definition of 'blogspam' if using a headline to point to an article you're commenting on qualifies as 'blogspam'. There's nothing in the law (from what I've seen) that says "If you have more than a paragraph of text, this doesn't apply to you" or anything similar to that.
The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament.
Interestingly, he has a personal axe to grind with Axel Springer AG as he was a big part of the student movement of '68 which was so intensely vilified by said company ("Youth in the street - Germany going down the drain ...").
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele
Oh, and I've noticed Twitter shows snippets from websites, too, now, so this will affect them as well.
On the last big conference for example there was a last minute petition for the further research of time travel. And it has to be discussed. Sure, it was dismissed relatively quickly and it was meant as a joke but those were 30 minutes lost for good.
Apart from that, and this is just my personal opinion, they are missing likable leading figures (a concept they dont really like). Head of the pirates Bernd Schloemer for example is more of a silent leader. One of the most famous pirates Christoph Lauer comes across as rude, uninterested and smug. A social behaviour 101 wouldnt be that bad for some of the members.
If you don't like state controlled redistribution of wealth you should start a revolution or emigrate.
Basically RSS with push and access controls. You subscribe to a feed and get pushes / pulls as long as you are paying it. Why isn't there a standard protocol for this on the web?
[1]http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf (German)
[EDIT: spelling]
So Google should charge. Then they can do like the phone companies with termination fees and call it a wash.
But what's more: I think if this law became a reality it wouldn't affect my personal web usage at all. News sites are about the only type of website left where I still type in the URL and go to the page directly instead of doing a search.