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France rules Google must pay news firms for content

reuters.com

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Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#61

Post by renewiltord »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #56
renewiltord wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the dream. When governments cannot simply impose their will on me at a whim. The fault isn't that Google can negotiate as an equal. The fault is that I can't negotiate as an equal when I want to marry a man or abort a foetus or drug myself. And I'd rather erode the power of the government than of myself every single time.

And I'm pretty sure the French people don't get to decide what I want. Only I get to decide that.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#62

Post by ocdtrekkie »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #40
jimmaswell wrote: post #4

Europe's not going to stop until the internet is totally burned to the ground, are they?

The internet was never going to last anyway. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it in order to guarantee the rights of their citizens. Instead of one international network, we'll end up with many national networks with strictly controlled boundaries. I'm fortunate I got to know the true internet. Truly one of the great wonders of this world.

The Internet isn't a magical virtual destination immune to the law. It's a communication technology, and like fax, the telephone, and the postal system before it, it runs within the framework of laws of the countries it operates in.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#63

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Reventlov wrote: post #45
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Google, being in a monopoly position in terms of search, can forces newspaper to provide their data for free, which is unfair

It should be able to just de-list news sources for French searchers. Again, I can’t see this surviving a non-French EU court. If it did, zeroing resources to crawling French news sites would be a reasonable response.

All that said, this is a silly way to go about subsidising local news. If France wants its newspapers, subsidise them. Don’t force an American company to provide you with a service and then make them pay for it.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#65

Post by Udik »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8
Sujan wrote: post #2

I wish Google would finally go with the kneejerk reaction of just unlisting all these sites from Google Search and News.

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.

Solution: keep running google news, but without the snippets. You search for news, you get a set of mute links to articles from various sources.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#66

Post by sneak »

kerhackernews wrote: post #64

While this is a complicated situation, it's clear that Google is profiting greatly off of journalistic works while these same organizations are struggling to survive.

I think that in a strict interpretation of current copyright attitudes, web spidering/mirroring in general is probably an infringement if you then republish any part of that content in any way for your own benefit. Imagine if you made a "Google for Twitter" today; you'd be sued out of existence. I believe precisely this happened with LinkedIn, IIRC.

I think the concept of copyrights is fundamentally incompatible with an open web, ultimately. It should be that a webserver sending you a response to your request is an implicit usage license. After all, the webserver doesn't have to send you anything. If it does, we take that to be an implicit agreement that you can have and use the data. That should be codified as law, because it is the current convention.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#67

Post by criddell »

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).

You don't think Google News has any value to Google?

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#68

Post by pdkl95 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #59
pdkl95 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Indeed they have had control of that market for some time. Being a dominant position over a market generally isn't illegal, but most antitrust laws put restrictions on how that monopoly power can be used.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#69

Post by AnimalMuppet »

_8j50 wrote: post #26
Sujan wrote: post #2

I wish Google would finally go with the kneejerk reaction of just unlisting all these sites from Google Search and News.

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. You seem to think it is a priviledge to be listed on google, I disagree, it is a priviledge for google to be allowed to conduct busi…

Who benefits whom? Does Google gain more from listing the sites, or do the sites gain more from being listed? (They're selling ads to make money, too, you know.)

I would guess that a news site makes more out of having an article listed than Google does from listing the article. It seems a bit unreasonable to make Google also pay. Why not have the news site pay to be listed? They're making money from it, too...

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#70

Post by ryuukk_ »

jimmaswell wrote: post #4

Europe's not going to stop until the internet is totally burned to the ground, are they?

haha mozilla is mad because they got caught begging for European commission money, ahahhahahahahahahahahaha

hahaha crapzilla bunch of beggars, get ready to meet with the SEC

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