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Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

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Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#181
post #91

But what do they want? I mean aside from "make laws to force google to license our stuff, they must be forced to publish our stuff, and forced to pay for it", which is totally insane. Personally just fucking let me pay $1 per article for me to read. I will NEVER subscribe to a recurring thing, but i bet you I'll start paying a lot, as I want to read many articles per month. Paywall sure, but get the fucking subscript…

The vast majority of people are willing to pay exactly $0 for news, because they can access it for free through sites that copy articles as they're published.

Well, then there's nothing lost since they would not get a subscription either.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#182
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> regardless of how weak the merits of the case are. Why would you think the case is weak? Documents recently disclosed by state AGs [1] strongly hinted at widespread fraud on AdX, Google's ad exchange. It was the top thread here about a month ago. It's absolutely not surprising that in the light of these revelations, the primary victims of this fraudulent system seek reparation. [1]: https://storage.courtlistener.co…

According to the Axios article, the lawsuits are about antitrust, not alleged fraud. As I detailed, the reason newspapers are in a precarious financial position is because they previously held a geographic monopoly on classifieds advertising in their cities, but now the Internet (starting with Craigslist) destroyed their monopoly & greatly lowered classified rates by its sheer size. This would have happened, and inde…

The document made public also stems from antitrust proceedings. I don't know enough about US legal to comment on the way these companies bring their case, though.

> now the Internet (starting with Craigslist) destroyed their monopoly & greatly lowered classified rates by its sheer size. This would have happened, and indeed already did, without Google or Facebook existing

It is one thing to accept that your position has been challenged by a new technology. But it is another thing that this new techology is monopolized by a single actor, which apparently uses any fraudulent way it can imagine to abuse market participants. While we can agree that newspapers were bound to suffer from new media (they already did when radio and TV appeared), they still deserve protection from fraud and abusive monopoly power.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most online ad platforms allow anyone to start a video ad campaign with just a few bucks. Not sure why smaller businesses don't do so. I suspect the targeting options aren't good enough to get "spatula city" good ROI.

That's why Google offers free "certificates" and "Courses" in adwords, analytics and using their services. It's more because small businesses do not know how to market or cater online, still. Sure there are a handful of successful ecomm shops that work in niche markets that work on word of mouth, and then there's the enmasse scale giants like Amazon that have their own marking departments. tl;dr Tools exist, people d…

Most small businesses also don't do well with online advertising. For example, if a kebab shop near me paid $50 on adwords, they would probably only get $10 of extra sales.

Whereas if they print $50 worth of signs and tape them to every nearby street pole, they'll sell $500 more.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#185
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a higher reading level than tenth grade? What's the point in using plain language if you're not going to speak plainly when you can switch to a programming language or math?

Yes, if I’m reading an English-language paper I want them to use the proper language. Don’t explain to me what “budget reconciliation” is, just write “budget reconciliation.” On the off chance there’s a word or phrase I don’t know, I can look it up.

Wouldn't the same apply to e.g. the New York Times [1] and the Washington Post [2], etc.? I find any article with "explainer" in the title to be extremely condescending; it seems to me that no newspaper has a monopoly on dumbing down topics.

[1] From https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/politics/us-debt-ceili...:

> All of this drama raises the question of what the debt limit really is... > > What is the debt limit? > > The debt limit is a cap on the total amount of money that the federal government is authorized to borrow to fulfill its financial obligations.

[2] From https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/18/every...:

> What's a continuing resolution? > > It's a bill that tells the federal government's agencies, “Keep on spending like you've been spending till we can actually come to some agreement on how much you should be spending.”

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a bait and switch? If the content is relevant, it's relevant. If you clicked through to something that said it was about NBA basketball and it was instead about knitting, _that_ would be a bait and switch.

I'm searching for publicly available content published on the internet. You're telling Google that there is certain public content available at this URL - that's the "bait" part. Afterwards you're telling me that no, this content is not actually available to the public - that's the "switch" part. I mean, there's nothing wrong with paywalls, but you have to be honest and explicit about what you're offering. If the pag…

When I search "30 Rock," four of the top results are pay services to consume this content. (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and NBC.) Do you view those as bait and switch? I.e. should those shows either be free, or Google should banish these from search?

I see your point, but I'm not sure Google ever made the promise that what appears in its search engine was free to consume. Perhaps the expectation is there, I get it.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm searching for publicly available content published on the internet. You're telling Google that there is certain public content available at this URL - that's the "bait" part. Afterwards you're telling me that no, this content is not actually available to the public - that's the "switch" part. I mean, there's nothing wrong with paywalls, but you have to be honest and explicit about what you're offering. If the pag…

When I search "30 Rock," four of the top results are pay services to consume this content. (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and NBC.) Do you view those as bait and switch? I.e. should those shows either be free, or Google should banish these from search? I see your point, but I'm not sure Google ever made the promise that what appears in its search engine was free to consume. Perhaps the expectation is there, I get it.

No, that's the exact equivalent to what I said above "if the page says "Latest NBA game - pay $1 to find out who won", that's fine, but then that's what you should provide to my search engine." - that's delivering searches based on the publicly available data, that page is about "30 Rock" and that's what I'm searching for.

This dissonance is not really applicable to video or audio, it's a problem specific to text content, because for video we don't have widespread search for actual content like we do for text, we're searching just on the metadata so the availability of the actual content does not affect searches.

For text content, if I search for a keyword and a phrase, it gets (or should get) searched on the actual content that's available. My beef is if the site wants google to index the actually unavailable content - for example, if you're selling a book and you're making just the title and abstract available to the public without buying that book, then searches should be based on this metadata. But if you tell google "here's also the content of page 313 with an interesting factoid about 30 Rock (which is the only place in our book which mentions 30 Rock), please index that so that searchers find our book not only when searching for its title but also when searching for 30 Rock" then I would consider it acceptable if and only if that page 313 with that 30 Rock related content is actually available to public; and if you want to keep that text hidden, then that's your prerogative but in that case you don't get to use that text as "advertising" to draw in searchers.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely untrue. You still live next a community and their politics effect you in ways they don’t people living hundreds of miles away. The problem is the internet convinces people they are apart of a global community and it’s all that matters. We need ways for communities to connect with each other that are modern and up to date other than following a local Facebook page.

>and their politics effect you in ways they don’t people living hundreds of miles away They don't effect me very much because the government mainly effects the real world and not the internet world.

What? I’m saying the local government does effect you in every way while it doesn’t effect people in your online community

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I search "30 Rock," four of the top results are pay services to consume this content. (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and NBC.) Do you view those as bait and switch? I.e. should those shows either be free, or Google should banish these from search? I see your point, but I'm not sure Google ever made the promise that what appears in its search engine was free to consume. Perhaps the expectation is there, I get it.

No, that's the exact equivalent to what I said above "if the page says "Latest NBA game - pay $1 to find out who won", that's fine, but then that's what you should provide to my search engine." - that's delivering searches based on the publicly available data, that page is about "30 Rock" and that's what I'm searching for. This dissonance is not really applicable to video or audio, it's a problem specific to text con…

> This dissonance is not really applicable to video or audio, it's a problem specific to text content, because for video we don't have widespread search for actual content like we do for text

Youtube? Also transcripts can inform SEO.

> if I search for a keyword and a phrase, it gets (or should get) searched on the actual content that's available.

The content is available. It exists on that web page. To consume that content, you might have to pay. Has google ever declared to only index free or ad-supported content? Maybe they have? Allegedly Google considers factors such as bounce rate when ranking content, so if those pages don't perform well, they should sink in results and it should work itself out.

I'll also point out that there aren't as many "hard paywall" content sites -- most are on a meter, so for _someone_, that article is available without paying out of pocket. (WSJ and FT being clear exceptions.) It's not Google's fault if you've exhausted your meter.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#190
post #73

This was predicted in the EPIC 2014 video in 02004. If you haven't seen it, it's a very thought-provoking look at the future of news. The original requires Flash, of course. It got a few things wrong. It doesn't mention filter bubbles and algorithmic radicalization, for instance.

You've mentioned this before, here:[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549627 (2013) There you link to writing of your own from 1997, "Real News": http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/real-news.html A book that explores some of these concepts (in terms of the Net's impact on traditional news media) is Andrew L. Shapiro's book The Control Revolution (1999).[2] What numerous prognosticators (yourself, Epic, Shapiro,…

I'd forgotten that comment! Thank you!

I did know about individual targeting last millennium, thanks to the controversy around DoubleClick, but didn't know it would become central to people's experience of the web. I don't remember whether I thought it was ridiculously unlikely, nearly certain, or somewhere in between.

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