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If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
The point is that their childish fantasy of a policy will only hurt everyone except for those who long for a tightly controlled media oligarchy with moats protecting from competition.
It seems counterintuitive to me, at least for my use case.
I rarely search for "news", I have a handful of websites to which I usually go to for them.
I might search the name in Google if for whatever reason it doesn't show on the top results when I start typing the name on the search bar, because I'm too lazy to use bookmarks.
Do most other people use aggregators or "search" for news?
If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
If we can't realign their incentives with revenue sharing with news sites, we need to shut them down, because the way things are going, Google is bleeding out the journalism industry. They were in a symbiotic relationship, but it has transitioned to a parasitic one.
[1] https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1055606344559063040
"Traffic of news sites depends heavily on Google." It seems counterintuitive to me, at least for my use case. I rarely search for "news", I have a handful of websites to which I usually go to for them. I might search the name in Google if for whatever reason it doesn't show on the top results when I start typing the name on the search bar, because I'm too lazy to use bookmarks. Do most other people use aggregators or…
"Traffic of news sites depends heavily on Google." It seems counterintuitive to me, at least for my use case. I rarely search for "news", I have a handful of websites to which I usually go to for them. I might search the name in Google if for whatever reason it doesn't show on the top results when I start typing the name on the search bar, because I'm too lazy to use bookmarks. Do most other people use aggregators or…
If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
Google provides a lot of traffic to the websites operated by the free and independent press. If they don't manage to monetize that traffic sufficiently then that's their problem. Google obeys robots.txt, if they don't want to be indexed it's easy to achieve this. I really don't understand why Google should pay for what they do.
If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
First: Google doesn't need saving. They're doing just fine.
Second: I fear that every proposal to save a free and independent press is going to destroy freedom in some very concrete ways.
"Traffic of news sites depends heavily on Google." It seems counterintuitive to me, at least for my use case. I rarely search for "news", I have a handful of websites to which I usually go to for them. I might search the name in Google if for whatever reason it doesn't show on the top results when I start typing the name on the search bar, because I'm too lazy to use bookmarks. Do most other people use aggregators or…
I don't think that's true at all. Beyond some short term traffic loss there are no negative consequences for the media industry if Google leaves this space. I suspect that's what big publishers actually aim for, they understand Google is not likely to pay and want to control how users discover news themselves.
If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
I agree, but... First: Google doesn't need saving . They're doing just fine. Second: I fear that every proposal to save a free and independent press is going to destroy freedom in some very concrete ways.
1) Any time somebody suggests taxing, breaking up, or otherwise regulating the tech giants, there's a chorus of voices afraid we'll kill their golden goose. That's why I phrased it as a choice to "save" one or the other. If it ever did come down to a binary choice, I'd sooner our society sacrificed Google to save NYT/BBC/Der Spiegel. Others may disagree, of course.
2) There's a legitimate argument to be made that government intervention to shore up the press will result in unintended consequences and/or make the press beholden to their government benefactors.