The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy • Hacker News Board

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#161

Post by yholio » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 1:53 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #144

c16 wrote: post #22

What's stopping Google from refusing to pay the news sites, thus de-indexing them from Google entirely? If the relationship is "pay me for my content", then refusing to serve links to their media is absolutely within their rights. Only the publishers have something to lose here.

The next step is probably a version of "must carry" for the Internet where Google is required by law to index news and required by law to pay for it.

The analogy is quite difficult. A television station is a well defined legal and technical object with a licensing regime, a standardized image format etc. A cable network is, by definition a transmission infrastructure designed to carry a number of such signals.

A "news website" and "news agregator" are... what exactly? Since search traffic is so valuable, publishers would modify their sites readily to fall just under the legal threshold for news sites in order to get picked up by Google's non-aggregator of non-news sites. It's virtually impossible to craft definitions that are simultaneously not trivial to circumvent by Google and also have no impact on established, unrelated internet content.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#162

Post by scarejunba » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 2:31 AM UTC

nradov wrote: post #111

c16 wrote: post #22

What's stopping Google from refusing to pay the news sites, thus de-indexing them from Google entirely? If the relationship is "pay me for my content", then refusing to serve links to their media is absolutely within their rights. Only the publishers have something to lose here.

What's stopping Google is that they would lose out on advertising revenue, and drive users to other search engines which do serve links to news media sites.

In practice, people trust Google more than hey trust the news site. Google News in Spain was shut down in 2014. Google dominates search engine market share in Spain today and for every period from 2014 to 2018.

In fact, Spain’s news industry suffered for it.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#163

Post by scarejunba » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 2:35 AM UTC

megaman8 wrote: post #99

Seems it's much easier to get some legislation passed than actually fix your business model. Everytime I come across an interesting news article and want to make a 10c donation, there's never an easy micropayment way to do it. Furthermore places like the wall street journal block their content and ask you to pay hundreds of dollars. I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars just so I can speed-read a single article fo…

The WSJ has gotten with the times. They’re doing well with their approach. It’s what their customer wants. I like their model.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#164

Post by scarejunba » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 2:38 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #69

vorpalhex wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very possible that only government regulation which forces participation (such as the link tax) can actually work. Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then? Why pretend it's anything else but Google directly paying for the news? Side point, if news subscriptions were reasonably priced (upfront pricing, and billed monthly instead of this odd weekly nonsense), they would probab…

> Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then? That sounds sensible enough to me. As an example, Canada taxed blank CDs and CDR drives and distributed the revenue to their music industry.

This sounds fantastic. I think I could set up a ‘news org’ for the free government revenue pretty easily.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#165

Post by wincy » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 4:22 AM UTC

wmf wrote: post #144

c16 wrote: post #22

What's stopping Google from refusing to pay the news sites, thus de-indexing them from Google entirely? If the relationship is "pay me for my content", then refusing to serve links to their media is absolutely within their rights. Only the publishers have something to lose here.

The next step is probably a version of "must carry" for the Internet where Google is required by law to index news and required by law to pay for it.

I can just see it now, The Daily Stormer and Alex Jones on the front page of Google News.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#166

Post by deckar01 » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 6:26 AM UTC

mkl wrote: post #153

deckar01 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not talking about automating things, but rather setting up a system of self-governance. What if posting a video required you to review other peoples' videos to earn the right to post? And if you deviate from the majority opinion you get penalized? Like captcha, this would solve a problem by aligning incentives and solving a massive problem with a massively distributed workforce of real people doing small tasks.

There is no conceivable way random consumers can identify whether a random video violates someone else's copyright. Every consumer would somehow have to be familiar with every video in existence, and who owns it, who they've licensed it to, and all those people's identities on every platform. Imagine if making your comment here required you to investigate the originality of several other comments and whether the post…

If you can't trust a user to identify copyright violations in someone else's work then you probably should blindly host content created by that user either. I think people would learn how copyright works so that they can prove it and earn the right to post on a platform with massive distribution.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#167

Post by kkarakk » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 7:23 AM UTC

Yetanfou wrote: post #26

mailslot wrote: post #6

Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. Even if Google links to a news site, I won’t click. It’s probably 30 secs for my new iPhone to partially fail loading, abruptly reload, and then auto play video I didn’t ask for... while covering the article with more ads that I have to c…

Browsing the commercial web without a host of filtering is like having unprotected intercourse with random strangers. Ad blockers will take care of the advertising, auto-playing video won't auto-play if there is no auto-play to begin with, Javascript is blocked by uBlock in 'advanced user' mode or by using a browser like Privacy Browser which blocks it by default (and allows per-site exceptions to be made). Sometimes…

>To get the latest headlines I suggest using a RSS reader (e.g. 'News' on Nextcloud/Owncloud) and subscribing to those feeds which you deem interesting. This gives you headlines, sometimes with a snippet of content, often without but subscribe to a few different publications and you'll have the same news described using different headlines which often give enough insight into whether the item is worth your time.

it also locks you into a bubble of your own creation with very little provocative or interesting content

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#168

Post by IanCal » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 8:38 AM UTC

village-idiot wrote: post #154

IanCal wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. If they already have the ability and protection for all of this, what difference does the legislation make? If not, how do they already have this freedom?

They have the freedom to tell Google to go away, but they don’t have the freedom to extract money from Google. They needed the legislature for that.

What do you mean by "freedom to extract money"? Charge and negotiate? If they don't have the right to negotiate fees for commercial use of their content, that sounds like quite a large missing part that needed adding.

Can you explicitly put down a case of something they couldn't do, but now can, and why you think that's a concern? Because I honestly just don't understand the point that people are trying to make with this.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#169

Post by Yetanfou » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 9:03 AM UTC

kkarakk wrote: post #167

Yetanfou wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsing the commercial web without a host of filtering is like having unprotected intercourse with random strangers. Ad blockers will take care of the advertising, auto-playing video won't auto-play if there is no auto-play to begin with, Javascript is blocked by uBlock in 'advanced user' mode or by using a browser like Privacy Browser which blocks it by default (and allows per-site exceptions to be made). Sometimes…

>To get the latest headlines I suggest using a RSS reader (e.g. 'News' on Nextcloud/Owncloud) and subscribing to those feeds which you deem interesting. This gives you headlines, sometimes with a snippet of content, often without but subscribe to a few different publications and you'll have the same news described using different headlines which often give enough insight into whether the item is worth your time. it a…

It would only do that if you limit your feed selection to your 'bubble', something you should not do. Add feeds which oppose your view to get a more balanced diet. This greatly expands the 'bubble' to the point of it no longer being discernible. Of course you can only read a limited number of articles in a given time frame but you'll have a much larger body of articles to choose from than those who rely on a single source.

To the parent poster, what is your solution to escaping the 'bubble'? I do hope you're not relying on any profiling search engines (Google, Bing, etc) or ditto news aggregator (or, ${deity} forbid, Facebook) for that purpose as these actually reinforce the bubble perspective by expressly showing you material deemed to coincide with your viewpoints.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#170

Post by thirdsun » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 10:41 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #30

vesinisa wrote: post #27

The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it should be the other way around. Sadly, the traditional media has a massive conflict of interest here, so the issue passed at least in my part of EU with little to no ado. But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will sur…

Is Google News really that big a deal for publishers? Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem? I don't see anything magic about Google News that isn't done better (Apple News), or more thoroughly (Twitter) elsewhere.

> Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem?

You should read up on the german Leistungsschutzrecht-Saga from a few years back. The media industry was lobbying for years to get Google to pay for showing links and snippets to their content in Google News. When the legislation finally passed Google offered publishers the option to delist them from Google News (not search) or keep showing their results while waiving their right to get paid. They all chose the latter thereby rendering the very same legislation they have been pushing for so long useless. Absolutely absurd.