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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

#111

Post by Spivak »

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…

I think the mistake here is that news orgs are trying to invent a business transaction where there isn't any. Either what Google/Meta are doing is copyright infringement in which case they have to stop or pay to license the content itself, or it's not and they're free to keep on keeping on. I would be surprised that after 30 years of public search engines we're just now deciding that it's copyright infringement. You could argue the summaries are for sure, but regular search results and the little context snippets that show what part of the article matched your query seem totally fine.

Search engines and social networks don't owe sites they link or their users link to any traffic. It would be silly to be like, "it's only copyright infringement if users don't click through the link enough."

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

#112

Post by pessimizer »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #30

Copyright laws are already strict enough in favor of the rights holders. Don't we all agree on that? Bills like this are like copyright law on steroids, making copyright holders even more powerful than they already are.

Eventually, of course, it will "only be fair" that we should pay a tax to speak about the news at all, to anyone. Or at least to submit what we plan to say about the news to the approval committee.

Cass Sunstein is a pioneer.

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

#113

Post by cherioo »

bevekspldnw wrote: post #72
refulgentis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Dou…

Genuine question, why don’t publishers stop using doubleclick and build their own?

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

#114

Post by stonogo »

jtriangle wrote: post #71
estebarb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's trivial to remove yourself from Google search results if you have a Google account. People who don't want to do business with Google don't regard that as trivial, since Google asks for a ton of personal information during onboarding.

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

#115

Post by vineyardmike »

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? Probably a bunch.

How often did the news service that published that headline also break the story vs acquired it from AP or another wire service?

I pay for NYT, WSJ and local news because I want news companies to exist. But news companies have a huge anti-tech bias (because they compete for ad revenue). NYT explicitly had a "no good news on tech" policy for a while (still?). There is a missing business model for news because it's hard to monetize, and information is free. Society should figure this out, and establish its values - but trying to pretend that google search results (or Facebook posts) are the evil villain killing news instead of the free movement of information on the internet at large is naive.

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

#116

Post by kemayo »

stonogo wrote: post #114
jtriangle wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's trivial to remove yourself from Google search results if you have a Google account . People who don't want to do business with Google don't regard that as trivial, since Google asks for a ton of personal information during onboarding.

You don't need a Google account. Googlebot respects robots.txt, as far as I know.

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

#117

Post by pessimizer »

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.

> Google didn't create all of that

No, they bought it in the form of Doubleclick, and its profits supported the rest of their money-losing business. If buying Doubleclick doesn't make you responsible for Doubleclick, I don't know what does.

People wouldn't tolerate the level of online ad blight we had 20 years ago, there are ad-blockers now; the reason Google isn't going buckwild with ads is because it can't.

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

#119

Post by riku_iki »

cherioo wrote: post #113
bevekspldnw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Dou…

Genuine question, why don’t publishers stop using doubleclick and build their own?

network effect for example: lots of advertisers are deeply integrated into google Ads infra.

But there is competition in this space.

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

#120

Post by raggi »

raggi wrote: post #118

Does anyone have a source or confirmation that Google is doing what the article says? If I search for journalism bill I get the politico article, and san francisco chronicle in the top stories list.

I see, it's slight and deliberate misrepresentation/under-presentation. Google did talk about it in https://blog.google/products/news/california-journalism-pres...

Specifically:

  To prepare for possible CJPA implications, we are beginning a short-term test for a small percentage of California users. The testing process involves removing links to California news websites, potentially covered by CJPA, to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience. Until there’s clarity on California’s regulatory environment, we’re also pausing further investments in the California news ecosystem, including new partnerships through Google News Showcase, our product and licensing program for news organizations, and planned expansions of the Google News Initiative.
You could of course say it's tit for tat, as this is also somewhat misrepresentation and misleading.
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