Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France rules Google must pay news firms for content

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 203 posts

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#41

Post by joejerryronnie »

falcor84 wrote: post #35
joejerryronnie wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that everybody is looking to the Federal Government to solve their problems now.

I don't see any conflict between wanting the federal government to be small, while still wanting that federal government to be in charge of some things - this is literally the reason for having a federation in the first place

The Federal Gov can’t be small and be in charge of all the things at the same time (not your statement but the general expectation I was referring to). It’s a balancing act but we always seem to strive for one extreme or the other.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#42

Post by will4274 »

smogcutter wrote: post #29

I get that HN hates journalists, but other than that I don’t see why people are on google’s side here. Is it about personal convenience? If you want to scrape someone else’s work and display it next to your own ads, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask you to pay up.

There was competition between various technologies, some open (like HTTP, HTML, and the open web) and some closed (like Flash and Silverlight). Open technology (where scraping is just normal use) won the day because users voted with their pocketbooks and overwhelming choose such technologies. French publishers want to have their cake and eat it too - they want to publish to open platforms, because that's what users prefer, but use the threat of legal force to prevent open use of such platforms.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#43

Post by creato »

dilyevsky wrote: post #32
izacus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why? Google derives value from news site's content. Advertisers pay google for clicks,if google treated news sites the same as any other site there would be no problem but google is adding additional value to their own product at the expense of news sites without additonal compensation. Hmm, sorry, this makes no sense - in this context the only possible advertisers are the news companies themselves (this is how you…

You and me googling for news sites and presumably clicking on ads (which I’m not really sure are even shown for news queries). In reality I think news sites benefit a lot more from being featured in that feed but i guess we’ll find out soon enough if that’s true

According to other posts in this thread, there are no ads on Google news.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#45

Post by Reventlov »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially France has said Google, being a monopoly, is not allowed to refuse to provide this service. They must do it, they must pay for it.

> France has said Google, being a monopoly, is not allowed to refuse to provide this service If it’s not providing the service, it’s no longer a monopoly. Assuming this will survive European appeal, which I don’t, one could yank all resources and cap e.g. bandwidth to Google News France. The aim isn’t to cripple the product. It’s to limit costs on a statutorily lossmaking product.

Well, the decision covers the fact google search is a monopoly. Not google news. Google, being in a monopoly position in terms of search, can forces newspaper to provide their data for free, which is unfair. If google wasn't in a monopoly (for search), it wouldn't be a problem.

So, yes, indeed, Google can stop providing search for the whole France.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#46

Post by [deleted] »

kevindong wrote: post #39
smogcutter wrote: post #29

I get that HN hates journalists, but other than that I don’t see why people are on google’s side here. Is it about personal convenience? If you want to scrape someone else’s work and display it next to your own ads, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask you to pay up.

I don't necessarily disagree about Google being required to pay publishers to make money off of having snippets of their content in Google News. But requiring Google to both index all websites (in a separate attempt to mitigate the monopoly effect) and requiring Google to pay publishers to include content in search results certainly has a bad smell to it. If Google had the option to not index the websites, then I'd s…

[deleted]

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#47

Post by qnsi »

eli wrote: post #11
mc32 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, pull the plug on them. Let’s see what they say then. I can’t imagine them forcing Google to list them but also pay them. Let’s see how organic traffic works for them.

Bad for users in the meantime.

not really Google's fault but publisher's.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#48

Post by pdkl95 »

ac29 wrote: post #37
smogcutter wrote: post #29

I get that HN hates journalists, but other than that I don’t see why people are on google’s side here. Is it about personal convenience? If you want to scrape someone else’s work and display it next to your own ads, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask you to pay up.

Google News doesn't have ads. In fact, its primary purpose appears to be to drive traffic to publisher's sites, which do have ads (presumably Google hopes they are Google ads).

> Google News doesn't have ads

A traditional abuse of monopoly power is providing a good or service at a loss to gain control of a new market.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#49

Post by renewiltord »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #34
trekrich wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should, and when they come back asking for it all to be undone they should say no. Let them swim for a little bit so france does not try this again. This was tried in spain, and quickly reversed.

So what you're saying is Google should have more power and authority than actual nations.

There's no total order of power and authority. I want the US government to not have the power and authority to set up and run a church but I want that power and authority, and I'm pretty sure I want Google to have that power and authority.

So yeah, I want Google to be able to say "I don't want to list papers that won't do this for free", yes.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#50

Post by qnsi »

flyinghamster wrote: post #25
blakesterz wrote: post #5

I think this is the actual judgement? https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/fr/communiques-de-pre... This techcrunch post has more details than Reuters: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/frances-competition-watchd... Abusive practices the agency says it suspects Google of at this stage of its investigation are: The imposition of unfair trading conditions; circumvention of the law; and discrimination (i.e. because of…

> discrimination (i.e. because of its unilateral policy of zero renumeration for all publishers) That's a novel take on the word "discrimination." They must be taking lessons from American corporations and politicians.

you are discriminating Chinese people because there are one bilion of them and you didnt sponsor one billion visa... Watch out soon the French government will find out and not let you in
Post reply on HN