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Going a step further, I think google should stop crawling websites that are paywalled. When I search for something, I want to see results that I can click on. Not some snippets from NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg and others which are heavily paywalled.
When I search for something I want the best results for the query, and sometimes those are behind a paywall.
[ ] I want to see results from sites I'd have to pay to access
There are plenty of web sites that will be happy to take the free traffic and it isn't like it matters to Facebook's bottom line if their mostly elderly users are arguing over some article from Fox News (which supports the journalism cartel bill in the US) or some article from Breitbart (which opposes the journalism cartel bill). I imagine it won't take long for Murdoch to change his mind and stop trying to shake down tech companies for the privilege of sending his media outlets free traffic.
Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook providing links to their content? It's a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm a bit puzzled as to why this was pushed, I'd love some context for this.
Actually, no.
It might be a symbiotic relationship for a small-time blog, but for a major news organization, it isn't. The Toronto Star and Global TV don't need freepub from Google.
One example among many: Most people see the headline – the headline written by a paid headline writer based on an article from a paid journalist on a staff of other professionals with families to feed - and then move on.
Very often a headline is all someone needs or wants. That has value. Without anyone clicking through to the web site, Google is getting the value from the headline, and contributing nothing to the web site in return.
It's like saying that when Google steals content from web sites and presents it as an answer card in search results that the web site somehow gets something out of it. That's completely false. The only one getting anything out of it is Google.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding was that the complaints was against using larger excerpts. I haven't used neither Googles nor Metas offerings, but the objection that I read in a different article was about users reading the news on Facebook, rather than letting the users click through to the newspapers. If Google and Meta just generate free traffic for the news site, then I'm not really sure why they're complaining. If their write…
When I visit https://news.google.com I only see very short excerpts like "Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action at U.S. Colleges".
Even on HN it’s not uncommon to see people commenting on articles they’ve only read the title of.
Sometimes taking the simple view is correct: It's a bad thing to prevent sites from linking to one another. It's a bad thing to interfere with the ability to access information on the Internet for reasons of nationalist politics.
The web may never be better than it was about 5 years ago, and that makes me very sad
Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook providing links to their content? It's a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm a bit puzzled as to why this was pushed, I'd love some context for this.
But realistically this the current Canadian government trying to shake down google and facebook for money to transfer to the ailing news industry in canada. The merits of the position for a link tax are pretty bad, and don’t really matter to the issue at hand. The government already gives hundreds of millions in grants and tax incentives to make the current journalism landscape in canada possible, without even looking at CBC the national broadcaster.
This is just a shake down job. They see google and facebook have a ton of money and the government thought they could threaten them into parting with some of it. The government doesn’t care about the implications of a link tax on the web, or mutually beneficial relationships, or any of that. It’s a shakedown.
Going a step further, I think google should stop crawling websites that are paywalled. When I search for something, I want to see results that I can click on. Not some snippets from NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg and others which are heavily paywalled.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I visit https://news.google.com I only see very short excerpts like "Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action at U.S. Colleges".
My interpretation is that Google/Meta do only reproduce short excerpts, however short excerpts is all many people ever read. If those excerpts satisfy people’s interests, then they never end up visiting the actual new sites. Even on HN it’s not uncommon to see people commenting on articles they’ve only read the title of.