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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

#221

Post by izacus »

ninkendo wrote: post #213
bawolff wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair - that's what news sites do - they summarize information happening elsewhere. Its hard to claim google is in the wrong for doing to news sites what news sites have been doing to other people since forever.

At some point someone is actually doing journalism though (in the best case at least.) News outlets that summarize things from e.g. Reuters or AP tend to have agreements which pay money for the information. You could reasonably argue that google should be doing the same, right?

Whoever is doing journalism, it's not those sites that now want a governmental tax handout to continue being bad.

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

#222

Post by [deleted] »

PeterisP wrote: post #188
bevekspldnw wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has thoroughly rigged the space, including manipulating bid stream data to underpay publishers while overcharging the advertiser. It’s called Project Bernake which is public now. I have it on reliable sources there is a lot more beyond that. The search antitrust suit was garbage, but the coming trials in the ad auction suit is going to hurt a lot more. They total lost their way, it’s actually insane when you’l…

All of what you write is in support of the parent post suggestion "why don’t publishers stop using doubleclick and build their own?" - the larger margin Google is taking (no matter how) between advertisers and publishers, the better deal publishers can offer when telling advertisers "come to our platform directly and get the same ad placements much cheaper"..

[deleted]

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

#223

Post by abdullahkhalids »

CM30 wrote: post #197
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to think about this more, are there any other business types, besides online news, where your success so radically depends on the decisions (read google news ranking and summarization algorithms) of some other business that you have zero relations with. Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in th…

Virtually every product and service with a website and social media presence? If you get banned from Google, your visibility online pretty much falls off a cliff and your sales will likely never recover. So anyone making money from a website is dependent on Google and other search engines... well mostly Google indexing said site. Also, any business whose livelihood depends on a large company's platform. Businesses an…

Except for Google search+product combo, in every other example you cited there is a contractual relation between the product and the SM.

If I have a product page on Facebook, I have a contract with Facebook. Facebook could choose to end that contract with me and close my account. But Google News blocking/downranking a news site does not involve any contract ending between Google News and the news site. If I don't have a product page on Facebook, Facebook could still choose to block/downrank posts where users on their own free will mention my product. But I don't think this really happens at any significant scale yet.

Same applies your Amazon/Ebay/Youtube/Twitch examples.

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

#224

Post by dylan604 »

whycome wrote: post #192
dylan604 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand, journalists used to actually investigate which took time which means it took money so that the story released had lots of corroborating sources, scrutinized by editors, and then released as a complete story. That might have meant things like actually interviewing people, requesting documents from places, or visiting the places in question. Today, it is just a bunch of people collecting tweets of random peo…

The most infuriating thing is that an article can take absolutely any stance on an issue simply by cherry picking tweets to go along with it. News has become a weird kind of curation market. And the funny thing about this payment arrangement that publishers want is that they are not paying any of those tweeters who may be breaking the news or themselves curating the info.

Why would you pay someone for a tweet? They posted it for free. Collecting tweets isn't journalism. Asking the user for more than 140 chars about what they are witnessing along with multiple others would then be closer to journalism. Tweets are just people self identifying who journalists could be interviewing. The interview allows for follow up to the tweet.

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

#226

Post by zmmmmm »

babypuncher wrote: post #203
zmmmmm wrote: post #170

I have sympathy for news publishers but I worry a lot about the principle of asserting that linking to something is an act that the link target has proprietary rights to over. At some level, it is almost a free speech issue. If I can't refer to what you are saying, without owing you something, you have power over not just my speech, but a power to limit how your work is subjected to criticism and debate. It's effecti…

If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you. Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them. The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere. It's worse in pla…

I don't think the law (from what I read of it) actually does target that though. Might as well cite it rather than refer to it in the abstract:

> The total number of the covered platform’s internet web pages displayed or presented to California residents during the month that link to, display, or present the eligible digital journalism provider’s news articles, works of journalism, or other content, or portions thereof.

Google can remove all the summaries and the law will apply just as much. In fact, from my reading of it, in other parts they are actually referring to "impressions" as the driver; that is it's explicitly the click through that they are asserting provides the value to Google, not the prevention of click through.

I get that emotionally, it's the prevention of click through that feels injurious, but it doesn't read as the spirit of this to me. I think possibly they know that if they didn't fully scope in links here Google would immediately just reduce it to raw links and this would reduce click through and it would hurt the intended beneficiaries of this more than it helps them.

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

#227

Post by akira2501 »

izacus wrote: post #220
akira2501 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. > make sure the fund is actually funding journalism I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can mana…

> To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage. Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS either and Google didn't force them to do that either. Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news industry, they did it to themselves.

Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply.

I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should you be "defending" them. What I'm attempting to do here is show that they definitely, perhaps indirectly, played a significant part in the shape of the modern web. While simultaneously decrying the laziness of publishers that led them to this late stage outcome.

I mean.. did you want to discuss how things might improve, or did you just want to score points?

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

#228

Post by paxys »

wmf wrote: post #174
paxys wrote: post #45

I wonder if these media conglomerates think the same laws should apply to them. If your news article has any linked information in it, you need to pay money to the owner of that link every time your article is opened. Seems only fair.

They never link out though.

They sometimes do. And even otherwise, most "news" these days is snippets and summarization of existing online content, the exact thing they are complaining about.

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

#229

Post by majormajor »

izacus wrote: post #220
akira2501 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. > make sure the fund is actually funding journalism I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can mana…

> To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage. Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS either and Google didn't force them to do that either. Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news industry, they did it to themselves.

Google is DEEPLY and directly involved in the ecosystems that:

* pay publishers more for showing video ads than showing text or image ads

* encourages and creates invasive tracking Javascript and cookies-and-similar tricks

* rewards SEO/spam tricks with higher placements in search

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

#230

Post by hedora »

babypuncher wrote: post #203
zmmmmm wrote: post #170

I have sympathy for news publishers but I worry a lot about the principle of asserting that linking to something is an act that the link target has proprietary rights to over. At some level, it is almost a free speech issue. If I can't refer to what you are saying, without owing you something, you have power over not just my speech, but a power to limit how your work is subjected to criticism and debate. It's effecti…

If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you. Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them. The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere. It's worse in pla…

There used to be audience caps that prevented news outlets from holding a monopoly over news in any given market.

Those should be brought back and applied to content moderation platforms.

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