The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
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The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
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Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#2If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#3If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
It's funny, at first, I misread that you wrote "I know which side I'd bet on." Which raises an interesting question. We know which side we'd probably be on, that's the rationalist speaking. Which side would we bet on though? Specifically, which side does the realist bet on winning in both the short and long run?
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#4I think the author has a good grasp of the situation that is more important than the average person understands. Murdoch knows his empire is waning and is attempting to ingratiate himself to government officials by becoming an unofficial mouthpiece of several conservative governments. His coup d'etat would be if he is able to turn that relationship official in some regions, pass laws to make his content mandatory to publish, them extract a link tax from the distributors. An irony of ironies considering he will build that on the back of ideogolgy that fundamentally criticizes this strategy.
Note: An exceptionally well written analysis that shows the author has a good understanding of both product and business motivations. It is so rare to see writing like this in the era of outrage journalism.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#5If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
The one making more "campaign contributions" of course.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#6Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. Even if Google links to a news site, I won’t click. It’s probably 30 secs for my new iPhone to partially fail loading, abruptly reload, and then auto play video I didn’t ask for... while covering the article with more ads that I have to click to dismiss.
Reading about the latest headlines is like sitting in a timeshare presentation, only it drains my phone battery and crashes my browser.
It’s a shame that the media is so bad at producing media. The quality is down, the delivery is terrible, and they want more money.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#7If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
Google provides a lot of traffic to the websites operated by the free and independent press. If they don't manage to monetize that traffic sufficiently then that's their problem. Google obeys robots.txt, if they don't want to be indexed it's easy to achieve this.
I really don't understand why Google should pay for what they do.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#8If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
It's funny, at first, I misread that you wrote "I know which side I'd bet on." Which raises an interesting question. We know which side we'd probably be on, that's the rationalist speaking. Which side would we bet on though? Specifically, which side does the realist bet on winning in both the short and long run?
Oh, I think it's pretty clear that Googbook has the legacy media at their mercy. The realist bet has been against responsible news media for almost long as that's even existed as a market segment.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#9I'm a lot less worried about the "link tax" clauses than the copyright liability clause. Not because the link tax is a good idea but because it's a spectacular own goal that is mainly going to hurt the idiots who lobbied for it.
Giving companies direct liability for policing copyright in user-uploaded content is a much bigger disaster, on two separate fronts, both highly damaging:
1) Implementing youtube-style content id will be a huge burden for small companies. Youtube reportedly spent tens of millions on it over several years. This tilts the field in favor of large incumbents even more than it already is by nature. While the amount of content to screen is really small, human-driven filtering is a possibility, but as soon as you need to scale up you're screwed. Any startup in Europe that needs to do this is a no-go from now on, IMO.
2) Back to that multi-milion content ID system: it sucks. It sucks really badly. It over-reports infringement left right and center. Now imagine what it will be like when youtube is liable a priori for every false negative; any sane legal department is going to demand a minimal number of false negatives at any cost. Now imagine what that will do to the false positive rate. Now imagine what the false positive rate will be when every site has to bodge together a similar system, with neither google's money nor google's technical expertise.
The second point has been missed by most criticism of the Copyright Directive, and to me it's the biggest problem of all. I fear the wasteland that will result. Are we going back to the point where only a handful of content producers exist and everybody else should be content just consuming it? Welcome to the 20th century, Europe.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#10And article 13 is not only for Google... Copyright scanning is hard and there government requires 100% recall, which can only be achieved by shutting down the site.
IMO the government receives the criticism and just redirects the fire towards big ones.