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Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

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Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#51

Post by bloppe »

r00fus wrote: post #32
LegitShady wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in Canada... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/29/google-ca... Although facebook/insta did refuse to be blackmailed, and many canadian news orgs are actually harmed by this sort of bullshit link taxing because their media can't be shared on facebook anymore, where a lot of older news watchers get their news https://about.fb.com/news/2023/06/changes-to-news-availabili...

So essentially Canada gets to subsidize news outlets by having Google pay for them as a yearly subscription. No link tax, just a tax for news. Sounds... reasonable?

This tax applies only to Google. It doesn't apply to any other tech company, and it never will. The DMA at least provides more-or-less objective criteria for what constitutes a "gatekeeper", but this is literally a private deal between Canada and Google.

I don't have a problem with publishers getting a greater share of ad revenue, but there are better ways to do it. The govt could increase taxes on ad exchanges categorically (still effectively a tax on Google and Facebook) and give publishers tax breaks. That would have the same effect but be way more reasonable.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#53

Post by bko »

flavius29663 wrote: post #38
kemayo wrote: post #6

I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.

> Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. If you're profiting from it, it's not a bad idea.

Aren’t you providing marketing to the newspaper? Isn’t that what these news agencies pay google billions for? There’s a whole industry (seo) designed around getting your site linked.

This looks like a money grab to me. What am I missing?

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#55

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

Isn’t the issue that Google links to websites and then reduces their commercial viability by showing summaries in search pages or by having their AI present the data without letting the website get the traffic? If so, I think a link tax is justified. At that point, Google is creating value for itself by removing value from others so it seems fair to me. And we don’t need the law to be perfect - let’s just make it applicable to companies with market capitalization above 100 billion.

But more than this, the big tech companies are just too powerful and their mere existence is anti competitive. I think that issue needs to be addressed independent of media outlets specifically. For example with AI, big tech companies are in a position to put themselves first in front of customers and prevent any smaller players from competing for users and market share. Now Apple and Microsoft are forcing their AI agents onto phones and computers, and potentially violating privacy of users and using all their data for training or other purposes. We’ve seen such a long history of anti competitive practices from these companies, and rather than dealing with performative court cases that drag out for years, we need to deal with the fact that they’re too big. They need to be split up. Or maybe just get taxed more compared to everyone else.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#56

Post by Zak »

flavius29663 wrote: post #38
kemayo wrote: post #6

I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.

> Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. If you're profiting from it, it's not a bad idea.

Why? What moral or legal principle entitles someone to compensation for linking to their website whether or not you're profiting from that?

It's a different question when there's an excerpt or machine-generated summary. In that case, copyright applies, and in most jurisdictions it may or may not be fair use depending on what is copied and how it is presented.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#57

Post by bloppe »

flavius29663 wrote: post #38
kemayo wrote: post #6

I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.

> Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. If you're profiting from it, it's not a bad idea.

It's actually still a bad idea, because nobody will link to you

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#58

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

topspin wrote: post #12
darby_eight wrote: post #7

I'm actually ok with this given that google is the source of the internet's dependency on advertisements as its sole method of reliable income for non-subscribers. They are more than welcome to reintroduce less destructive methods of transacting over content.

> given that google is the source of the internet's dependency on advertisements I remember the internet before Google. There were lots of ads. It was great watching animated GIF ads load at 56 Kbps. There were pop-up adds and crazy obnoxious flashing ads and NSFW ads. Google didn't create all of that: the ad-sphere was alive and kicking long before anyone heard of Google.

Yes there were obnoxious ads that popped up, but we didn’t have the same degree of monopolization in platforms or walled gardens, and we didn’t have so many industries whose existence depends on online advertising. Google and Facebook’s ads may not be as obnoxious but there’s more of them (look at how many ads there are on search results page) and they’ve affected the viability of many other parts of the economy in my opinion.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#60

Post by WalterBright »

kemayo wrote: post #6

I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.

We welcome all links to dlang.org! No fees!
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