Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:06 AM UTC

unclebucknasty wrote: post #185

olyjohn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of a symbiotic relationship. Google gets a useful news page, the news media get links to their articles. I honestly could care less about either of them. I think they should just fight it out on their own and keep our legal system and tax payers time and money out of it.

> Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of a symbiotic relationship. There's definitely some symbiosis here, but it's ultimately Google that's dependent on the news (and other) sites' content, which it gets for free. That is, the news sites (and other content providers) could exist without Google. But, Google could not exist without their content. At least that's my observation. So, I wasn't pickin…

[deleted]

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

#252

Post by cush » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:08 AM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #178

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…

>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossib…

> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable

To appease Google…

Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets

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

#253

Post by chgs » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:10 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #229

izacus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Remember when google first launched and it was so great as it was just some text adverts rather than things like punch the monkey.

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

#254

Post by akira2501 » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:15 AM UTC

izacus wrote: post #241

akira2501 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers. You're crafting a false narrative of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave by someone else, when that is not even remotely true. They've been cost cutting and compromising themselves way before some evil tech corporation came to them. There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less…

> AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.

That was very generous of the billion dollar corporation to do. I'm sure there was no self serving motivation behind it.

> of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave

You seem to be struggling to see this outside of a black and white narrative and are mistaking your own polemic as being diametrically opposed to my point of view.

> There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.

You also seem to be unaware of just how many small and medium sized broadcasters and publishers there are or how large this industry actually is. You are interested in narratives, I'm interested in facts. I don't think there's much more to discuss between us.

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

#255

Post by brevitea » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:15 AM UTC

LegitShady wrote: post #26

setgree wrote: post #24

This threat is credible: Google shut off Spain's access to Google News for eight years for similar reasons [0]. [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-news-re-opens-spai...

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, get of Facebook already and go to the news sites?

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

#256

Post by brevitea » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:17 AM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #50

r00fus wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Google and Meta had each been funding journalism — actual journalism, not vulture capital clickbait — voluntarily, which they are now not. Google is now paying $100m, most of which goes to huge corporations. Meta pulled out altogether, slashing traffic to canadian media sites by half.

How were Meta and Google funding "actual" journalism vs. clickbait? Do you have any sources on that?

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

#257

Post by brevitea » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:18 AM UTC

cush wrote: post #248

Good. Hopefully other states follow. The headline might as well be, “After Decades of Freebooting Their Content, Google Threatens to Kill News Rather Than Pay Journalists for Their Work” Google is now the modern, lazy business equivalent of a bum asking for free stuff in exchange for “exposure”

Exactly this. The sooner we stop pulling the wool over our own eyes on what Google and Meta actually do with respect to "news", globally, the better.

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

#258

Post by asow92 » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:22 AM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #178

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…

>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossib…

As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that:

1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high.

2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue.

3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril.

4) If governments pay news outlets, we're trading one captured entity for another. Sure, you might get less ads about singles in your area looking meet up, paywalls, and login prompts, but also might get less news critical to the government funding that news.

The people in the trenches building the product and writing the news don't want these things you mention, and we understand when we're building anti-patterns, but the bottom line demands it.

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

#259

Post by xedrac » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:31 AM UTC

asow92 wrote: post #258

notatoad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossib…

As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that: 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. 2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue. 3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril. 4) If governments pay news o…

> 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high.

So much of news today is not even worthy of my attention, let alone my money.

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

#260

Post by afavour » Sat, Apr 13, 2024, 12:34 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #246

b112 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google was doing what news sites did, it would have journalists writing articles, researching data, investigating, etc. Yet they do none of that . Your statement is absurd.

I kinda wonder at what point would Google enter the field by sucking AFP's feed, auto filtering it and AI generate articles. Yahoo News wasn't that, but a search engine getting into the news business would not be unprecedented.

All of this still requires actual journalism to happen at some point, though. Someone needs to conduct interviews. AI isn’t going to do that any time soon.