Europe's not going to stop until the internet is totally burned to the ground, are they?
If you can’t beat them, regulate; nickel and dime them
France rules Google must pay news firms for content
51–60 of 203 posts
Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content
#52I 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.
Besides the "us vs them" attitude with regard to journalists, HN is often strangely nationalistic as well, so that makes for a double whammy in this case.
Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content
#53I 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 get that HN hates journalists, but other than that I don’t see why people are on google’s side here
Lots of G employees here.
Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content
#54I 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.
Your misunderstanding of the situation is pretty apparent. Google displays snippets, France says pay up if you display any content that's not a title, legally. Google says "ok but we're still not going to pay" and nixes the snippets and only keeps the title. Court says, that's not how the law should be interpreted even though it's a pretty fair interpretation, pay them anyway for the last 6 months and negotiate.
Scraping their work is one thing but there's a difference between linking to their work with enough of a description so that people can decide whether they want to read it or not and using all of it wholesale.
Also you're straight up wrong about the ads and the news in France. Google has no ads on google news. That's what this is about. If you want to talk about the discovery app that's a wholly different beast and not under consideration for this law. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
I personally think they should just get their French news from Quebec. If there's no lower limit on the amount news agencies can charge google then just get an €1 annual license for content.
Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content
#55Europe's not going to stop until the internet is totally burned to the ground, are they?
Google is responsible for burning the Internet to the ground. In general, Silicon Valley companies pretend to be creating Internet-ethos software while actually creating centrally administered proprietary services that are lightning rods for regulation. The net effect is helping to immunize incumbent power structures against real decentralized communications. This decision would have necessarily been different if the…
why do you think no decentralized community worked? In my humble opinion it's because users don't actually care about them.
Twitter is pretty open, meaning you can write pretty much anything you want and it helped topple some power structures in middle east.
what do you think would happen in the USA if there were only open source software on the Internet?
Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I want Google to be able to say "I don't want to list papers that won't do this for free"
That's up to the french people to decide. Google negotiating with nations as if it was a trade agreement between equals would mean we're living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content
#57The actual PDF of the decision is there: https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/sites/default/files/i...
The arguments are:
- Press freedom is a fundamental right
- The press is not in its best state right now in France, so hitting them (for example, removing them from the search result from Google, which is in a monopoly position) is dangerous for the press freedom
- Google did not try to negotiate a fair price for the news, with the publisher
- Google applying a "zero price" for newspaper is not reasonable, as google has an economic incentive (users using its search engine) to display the news paper content in its search engine and in google news
- Google is in a monopoly decision, as most of the traffic of the newspapers comes from Google
- Google is discriminatory as it applies to newspapers equal treatments, even if they are in different situations (newspaper with protected content, and newspaper without protected content)
- Google tries to bypass the spirit of the law, which is for newspapers to get paid for their content by people using their content, and Google can do so because it's in a monopoly position in search
- Google does not has objectives explanations regarding its behavior besides « we don't pay for content », but paid for content in the past (for example, the french agency AFP)
The decision is manyfold:
- Google has to enter negociations, in a fair manner (I think this means no « we will not pay anything » unless they can back it off);
- The price decided by the negociations will be applied retroactively, from the date the new law was passed
- They have to report to the authority every three months the progress they make on this
- Restore the service they provided to newspapers to what was in place before the new law was voted
Let's note the court making this decision can not decide what the law is, and applies it as it was voted; even if it thinks some part of the law sucks, they cannot change it, it's not their role in the justice system.
Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems to me the EU and GDPR-like legislation is saving the internet from the cancer of corporate control, particularly American Big Data like Google and Facebook. The latter are the ones burning the internet down with their walled gardens.
Thank you: this conversation was beginning to feel surreal, between the "let's pull the plug on these frenchies!" and the "how dare a sovereign state wants to legiferate on the activities of an American company on its territory"... I do enjoy the irony of some Americans blaming big data companies when the president of their choice does not get elected, all the while advocating for less power to French news agencies (…
I'm pretty sure it's different people in each case. Certainly I don't blame any big tech company for any election. All I want is the Internet as I recall it: free voluntary association. My user agent is powerful enough to ensure this and I'm happy with it.
If I wanted to use only directories and webrings I could do so today. I'm fine with that. If I want to use Google I have to use Google terms. That's okay. If I don't, I can easily just not.
I don't think it'll last, though. The guys who blame tech companies for elections are the same guys saying they need to be regulated. And so eventually we'll have all these highly-regulated services instead of the thing I've enjoyed. But that's the tyranny of the majority, I suppose. I can find a way to work with it.
Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
how long has Google news been running, I would think they had control of that market long ago if that's what they were aiming for.
Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No. In traditional sense it's having higher not lower price, forcing buyers to pay more. Monopoly by definition already has 100% of the market