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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

#101

Post by bagacrap »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #90
bvandewalle wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will take Europe over the US where my private data is being sold by Facebook and Google to the highest bidder without any single law protecting me. Sure some of those laws are a pain but they are needed checks and balances to avoid living in a dystopian world.

You are lucky then that you are literally wrong. Neither FB nor Google are selling your data to anyone.

fb has been caught granting advertisers direct access to user data. So maybe they don't now, but there is reason to distrust them.

Google has never been caught doing anything of the sort but even sophisticated and savvy commentators like those you find on hn have a hard time distinguishing between the two companies, for reasons that escape my understanding.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#102

Post by boudin »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #69
_8j50 wrote: 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…

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...

Google without any content to list will be kinda useless. As a user, a search engine that decides to not list some content for this kind of reason makes it a quite bad search engine.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#103

Post by bagacrap »

hiccuphippo wrote: post #44

I wonder if France ultimately wants Google to pay for the content and the News sites to pay Google for listing them, reaching a net of zero for both sides, other than the taxes that France banks from both sides.

does France get tax revenue in this scenario? Usually corporate expenses are tax deductible, ie you only pay tax on profit.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#104

Post by lowdose »

bgorman wrote: post #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 differ…

Did you also notice an European brain drain?

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#105

Post by AnimalMuppet »

_8j50 wrote: post #88
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think you are only looking at the most obvious at the expense of everything else. Ig google is my go to place for news, I would also use them to search for either news related or unrelated terms. If all news sites were unlisted from Google but remained on Bing, Bing's search revenue would increase and Google's will decrease. I don't know who makes more money out of the relationship, that is not the problem here. Ev…

> Even if news sites make more moneyz they did not sign a contract with Google accepting this financial relationship.

No, and it also didn't sign a contract with Google where Google accepted responsibility to promote access to the news site's pages, either.

So, in the absence of a contract, what determines the way that the relationship between them should be? robots.txt, that's what. If French news sites want to be on the web but not indexed, that's the existing mechanism to control how Google handles the content.

But demanding a contract so that Google can legitimately benefit, but not demanding one so that the news site can legitimately benefit, seems rather one-sided to me.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#106

Post by dang »

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.

Please don't post flamebait to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#108

Post by imgabe »

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.

The newspapers are providing their data for free to anyone who visits their website, assuming it's not behind a paywall. Google isn't forcing them to do that. If they want people to have to pay for it, make that a requirement of visiting the site.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#109

Post by wolco »

Reventlov wrote: post #74
PunksATawnyFill wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These claims seem irrelevant, inaccurate, or dumb. Google News only shows brief abstracts from each article, and drives traffic to the publications' own sites. It's free advertising! How is this at all BAD for the publications?

It's not bad, but they are not paying for this content, even if they have an incentive to display these abstracts (people using their tools). The law regarding the « droits voisins » (related rights) says it's a right to get a fair price for people using your content, and that's why Google has to pay if they want to display the content. As google is in a monopoly position, they can not refuse to display them (without…

A better summary.

Press freedom is fundamental. Monopoly must pay for press because they must show it. We demand they show it for press freedom.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#110

Post by hedora »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #90
bvandewalle wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will take Europe over the US where my private data is being sold by Facebook and Google to the highest bidder without any single law protecting me. Sure some of those laws are a pain but they are needed checks and balances to avoid living in a dystopian world.

You are lucky then that you are literally wrong. Neither FB nor Google are selling your data to anyone.

Selling targeting information about me is a form of “selling my data”.

Out of $160b in revenue in 2019, $134b of Google’s revenue came from ads. Most of the ad revenue is in the form of targeted ads, so if they stopped selling people’s information, they’d immediately go under.

Similar numbers apply to Facebook.

I honestly don’t understand where this argument that those companies don’t sell people’s information comes from. I hear it often enough to wonder if people are intentionally being disingenuous, astroturfing, etc...

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