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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

#71

Post by jtriangle »

estebarb wrote: post #62
flavius29663 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In that case Google should pay everyone they link to, not just the ones with politician friends that can lobby for themselves. If they don't want a Google to index them they can use robots.txt to prevent it.

Exactly. If google showing your site in search results is a problem, it's trivial to remove yourself from said search results, and to prevent your site from ever being crawled in the first place.

What's actually happening here is that news media orgs were in a huge bubble because of the advent of the internet, and they've failed to monetize effectively. So they're looking for a revenue source to shore up their failed model, and they know they'd lose revenue if they removed themselves from search results.

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

#72

Post by bevekspldnw »

refulgentis wrote: post #46
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.

I worked at Google until October 2023, the blog post is in bad faith. This is a good comment that gets at why[1], TL;DR: the hedge fund thing is a complete nonsequitur. The programs are the equivalent of Google Cloud grants, and Google actively disinvested from News[2] just because that was an easy place to get your mandated Sundar cuts for Wall Street. They're not a good steward of anything other than their stock pr…

The link tax is a red herring and a poor understanding on the part of legislators. The real issue is pre-adtech publishers kept 100% of ad revenue and double click now takes a massive cut (which they briefly touch on).

All that cash flowing into MTV is real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away - it’s also the reason search is entering a utility collapse curve since AI can generate unlimited click bait.

Double click will end up killing google, it’s already too late to go back.

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

#73

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #63
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #55

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 app…

> 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. This has already been the case for >10 years.

I agree. But it still has not been fixed or even acknowledged broadly. And with each new successive wave of innovation (like AI), it seems they are able to simply take up all the profits that could exist, without working hard and competing fairly for it.

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

#74

Post by kemayo »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #55

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 app…

Can't speak for what Google plans to do in the future, but currently news results in search can either be a "top stories" block at the top of the results, or regular search results. In "top stories" you get just the headline and maybe an associated picture. In regular search results you get the headline, and a fragment of the first sentence of the article.

If seeing the headline and maybe a tiny fragment of the first words is enough to remove commercial viability, there's a lot of things that do that. Physical newspapers/magazines are generally displayed in a way that provides that information, for instance.

I'm sure there are people who search, see the headline, and don't click through. But the counterargument is that other people do click through, and without the search results then the news website wouldn't have received any of that traffic.

Perhaps-ironically, it looks like a full AI-synthesis approach would be a way to get around paying the news orgs under this law. If the Google results just give a synthesized blend of news from across the web without linking to anything in particular...

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

#75

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

wodenokoto wrote: post #67
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #55

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 app…

My understanding is you have to ask to be in the news wheel. Anyone can ask to be removed from the index. The internet is old enough that it has long been standard that search is opt out, when you are part of the World Wide Web.

Does that matter though? If they control the means of getting to the user for entire segments, it makes alternatives less viable. Users don’t have much choice (it’s not like there is another competing news UI element that a user can choose to occupy those parts of the screen) and there isn’t really fair competition.

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

#76

Post by wobbly_bush »

jaredwiener wrote: post #19

This requires some nuance, since I think it goes beyond a "tax on linking," as I have seen it described. News is a strange product, and one that I think a lot of people in tech get wrong. The atomic unit of journalism is not an article....it's the reporting. Even deciding to write an article is an act based on the analysis of the reporting. Further, a good headline often tells the story itself -- and that is implicit…

> How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link?

Somewhat related - I have clicked a lot more on Axios articles which I know are 2-5 minute reads, compared to other long form articles where the author wanted to write a novella. Infact I look forward to reading Axios articles which I know are well written, compared to others which are of varying quality, so less inclination to click.

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

#77

Post by jeffbee »

ikidd wrote: post #70
bloppe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 categ…

It applied to Facebook/Meta and any larger social media sites. Meta just shut it down and any direct contributions to journalism that they were making, and now the publishers are crying because their traffic has plummetted, to the surprise of precisely nobody except them. Not sure where you're getting your information.

The proposed California law applies only to sites with 1 billion MAU and sales or market cap over $550 billion. It only applies to Alphabet and Meta.

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

#78

Post by megabytemike »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #55

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 app…

Agree that charging on a link is bad. I'd even argue, that if you are going to charge for linking to an article, then I'd expect no ads on that site.

But, anything beyond a link starts to open up questions for me.

Who even uses Google's AI summarize feature for articles? For me, most of the time it's been because the pop-up for it jumped in the way for me and it was an accidental click. When I have intentionally used it, it's been a pretty poor summary and misses key nuances that make the article unique compared to other publishers.

Taking a step back further, I don't know who is asking for this feature. What's the target market here?

Also, perhaps I'm wrong here but I don't think anyone would want an AI summarized version of other types of media like songs or movies.

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

#79

Post by hibikir »

jaredwiener wrote: post #48
diego_sandoval wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, journalism is a tough business, but that doesn't justify bending the rules in their favor. Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No. In the end, people choose to do open source knowing that they're not going to get much mo…

I wasn't advocating for a position -- I also think this law will have unintended negative consequences. My point is simply that this is more than just linking. It's a full-on parasitic relationship, where Google (and Meta, and others) take the reporting that others are doing and build their own traffic off of that, while draining the people doing the work dry. News orgs are then faced with a terrible choice -- cut of…

Yes, and it gets even more fun when the source is summarizing your page, and feeding it to their AI assistant, so they stop sending you much traffic.

The business model of links + ads is going to be more in peril in the future than it is today, regardless of the regulatory environment. We see the problem all over media: If you are relying on google to give you traffic, your content better be really cheap and SEO'd to death, or be a funnel where most content is hidden, trying to drive people into subscriptions. Agglomeration in the traffic driving and ad spaces leads to them taking most of the profit unless there's agglomeration on the other end. Just like in American healthcare, more people using the same insurance companies that try to drag reimbursement rates down is met by hospital networks gobbling up practices and pharmacies, as to get market power that the insurer cannot ignore. So we'll see situations where, say, Google and the NYT have to decide whether the search traffic is worth it, and what's the right price for letting the latest AI ingest the entire contents of the Times.

It's not about moral good or bad, but about how incentive structures leave us with few viable economic models. Both software engineers and journalists will change behavior to make more money.

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

#80

Post by Dylan16807 »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #39
jaredwiener wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea why this is getting downvoted, but would love to hear what people think is wrong.

It's true, journalism is a tough business, but that doesn't justify bending the rules in their favor. Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No. In the end, people choose to do open source knowing that they're not going to get much mo…

> Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use?

I think that would be an amazing law, actually.

A quasi-tax that affects everyone and helps fund public goods is easy to get my support.

But taxing specifically linking by a couple companies is not good.

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