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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

#91

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.

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Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"The" law? There are as many as there are sovereign nations. Are foreigners subjected to your country's laws when they post on your site? No. Your laws cannot be enforced because those people aren't subjected to it. Like an embassy on foreign soil, you have no actual power over those people. This very site's terms of service infringes my rights by requiring arbitration. Can I do anything about it by legal means? Who…

So essentially each country has control of the physical structure within their borders. This is not different from any other technology.

Now, a country can then hold anything they control as collateral for any other demand they make: France could block a site from the country, they could seize any assets that site has in the country, or arrest personnel in that country. France has a vested interest in not overplaying their hand, such that companies won't operate there at all, but effectively a country has complete power to demand anything in exchange for access to their country.

In that way, the Internet is not subject to any country's law in only that country, but every country's law in every country, insofar as those countries are places they want to do business.

Nothing here is new and the US is traditionally the largest user of this sort of power.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#93
post #28
post #26

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. 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…

> 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…

Google profit from listing those news site and presenting them in a synthetic way because it’s the whole feature of google news.

Google news is part of the google user experience, that will retains users in time and agregate a detailed profil of the user.

That detail profile include the news search habit.

It does not sound very popular here but I see the leech as being the search engine here, not the company actually producing the content in naturals language and dispatching journalists to work on it.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#94
The problem is that "press freedom" as a right should not mean "The press MUST receive leads through all search engines and the search engines MUST pay for doing so".

"Press freedom" historically means that the press can publish anything factual, artistic, or opinion based without fear of government censorship or retribution.

We are seeing the EU and various EU countries redefine fundamental terms for entirely different things, to the point where the original rights are completely eroded, and instead we have a system that effectively serves special interest groups in Europe.

An infamous example of this is the "right to be forgotten". In Europe there is now a process where individuals can effectively censor the internet/press from publishing factual information about their past transgressions. Ostensibly this is to allow the individual to move on with their life. For example, someone convicted of murder has successfully removed articles related to his murder from the internet (in Europe). This is incredibly dangerous. Why should the government get to decide what fact based censorship is irrelevant or not? I certainly think it is pertinent for society to know about past murders.

The EU is slowly eroding all individual liberties, while its markets are becoming less competitive and its welfare state expands to unprecedented levels. Free speech and freedom or religion are much worse in Europe. Germany is run by a Christian political party. In addition to no longer being able to advocate for Nazi politics in Germany, now you cannot speak about certain facts that have occurred in the past. Now France is attempting this novel "shake down of tech giants we cannot compete with" strategy, which is frankly a strategy that was until recently more likely to be seen in an Authoritarian country like China than the country that was the inspiration for the US independence.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#95
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

It’s not the ad, it’s your profile. Even if you surf anonymously. Anonymous data will be aggregated. Not as cool as a logged-in user, but okay.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#96
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure i follow... this is about showing a snippet of a news article at the top of search result right? similar to pulling youtube videos, wikipedia articles, or stackoverflow answers and showing them at the top of your search result. i mean, sometimes, i don't even leave the search result page because i get my answer right there. heck, i don't even leave my address bar nowadays when using chrome! news publications…

Well, there are no ads in Google News. So, Google just will share their other revenue with news agencies?

Google news main and only feature is to crawl existing news website.

Those news agency are actually putting natural language together and conducting journalist work.

Until google can auto-generate NYT/Guardian/Le monde/El pays... The leech is google; not the news.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#97
post #22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure i follow... this is about showing a snippet of a news article at the top of search result right? similar to pulling youtube videos, wikipedia articles, or stackoverflow answers and showing them at the top of your search result. i mean, sometimes, i don't even leave the search result page because i get my answer right there. heck, i don't even leave my address bar nowadays when using chrome! news publications…

But Google doesn't need to support them.

They should close google news then.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 F…

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Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#99
post #37

Earlier 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).

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

This interpretation of the law says that Google must pay for the right to direct traffic to a publisher who is running some other ad network's ads (or uses a subscription model). No, I do not think this arrangement has any value to Google, in fact it is obviously negative value.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#100

The 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…

> Google is discriminatory as it applies to newspapers equal treatments, even if they are in different situations

This would appear to be the opposite of what "discriminatory" means.

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