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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

#151

Post by eiaoa »

flukus wrote: post #150
Kalium wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet. You're completely right about the absolutely critical importance of a free, open, and brave press. Yet it's possible that this particular business problem, the one you have so wisely and correctly pointed to, is not novel. Newspapers historically hav…

> Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet. 3. Distribution. News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits…

> News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone.

A viable, independent media is vital to a well-functioning democracy. I just realized that the implication decision behind of all this talk (about how the new media need to find a viable business model) is that our system of government shouldn't stand unless some of its vital organs are profitable in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system. Capitalism is given a higher priority than democracy.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#152

Post by flukus »

eiaoa wrote: post #151
flukus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet. 3. Distribution. News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits…

> News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone. A viable, independent media is vital to a well-functioning democracy. I just realized that the implication decision behind of all this talk (about how the new media nee…

> our system of government shouldn't stand unless some of its vital organs are profitable in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system

Plenty of countries get around this with independent but government funded media, the BBC in the UK, ABC in Australia, etc. I guess NPR is probably the closest thing in the US. They do a better job at reporting the news than most commercial providers and their sites are a lot less crapware infested (but getting worse), compare this (https://www.abc.net.au/news/) to just about any commercial news organisation.

The only problem I've ever had with the ABC is that it's crap at local news.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#153

Post by mkl »

deckar01 wrote: post #145
cr0sh wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no reason that posting content to a platform that millions of people could see should be free or instant. So if someone is on a particular platform, such as the one we're currently using, and they post a base64 encoded image, or article, or whatever... ...you really want every possible comment screened, paid for, or be delayed in some manner so someone or something can check that the data is legit? That ca…

I am not talking about automating things, but rather setting up a system of self-governance. What if posting a video required you to review other peoples' videos to earn the right to post? And if you deviate from the majority opinion you get penalized? Like captcha, this would solve a problem by aligning incentives and solving a massive problem with a massively distributed workforce of real people doing small tasks.

There is no conceivable way random consumers can identify whether a random video violates someone else's copyright. Every consumer would somehow have to be familiar with every video in existence, and who owns it, who they've licensed it to, and all those people's identities on every platform.

Imagine if making your comment here required you to investigate the originality of several other comments and whether the posters may have posted similar things elsewhere under other names, or licensed someone else's content, or violated someone else's copyright. Would you still bother posting?

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#154

Post by village-idiot »

IanCal wrote: post #149
devman0 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already have that freedom. They can post a robots.txt that tells Google to not index certain content.

I don't understand. If they already have the ability and protection for all of this, what difference does the legislation make? If not, how do they already have this freedom?

They have the freedom to tell Google to go away, but they don’t have the freedom to extract money from Google. They needed the legislature for that.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#155

Post by eiaoa »

flukus wrote: post #152
eiaoa wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone. A viable, independent media is vital to a well-functioning democracy. I just realized that the implication decision behind of all this talk (about how the new media nee…

> our system of government shouldn't stand unless some of its vital organs are profitable in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system Plenty of countries get around this with independent but government funded media, the BBC in the UK, ABC in Australia, etc. I guess NPR is probably the closest thing in the US. They do a better job at reporting the news than most commercial providers and their sites are a lot less crapware infe…

> Plenty of countries get around this with independent but government funded media

Yeah, that's kinda what I was getting at. I don't recall the conversation advancing in that direction very often.

> The only problem I've ever had with the ABC is that it's crap at local news.

I honestly think local news is the main problem. I'm not super pessimistic about the NYT, the WSJ, or the Washington Post. They have the prestige and the reach to attract lots of subscribers and/or patrons, and they're big enough to invest heavily in technology. It's the small local and regional papers that worry me. The staff per eyeball to cover all their beats is probably a lot less favorable, and they don't have much prestige to draw on to attract other support.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#156

Post by zaroth »

IanCal wrote: post #148
zaroth wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So damned if you do and damned if you don’t? How does this right here not destroy the prospect of any small company trying to scale operations in this space? From the company’s perspective, it’s like a DDoS attack that is illegal to defend yourself against.

Small companies have lower requirements for what they need to do under the directive. About the measures taken, for example: > The measures should be proportionate in order to avoid imposing disproportionately complicated or costly obligations on certain online content sharing service providers, taking into account notably their small size. For small/micro enterprises this then means that for the DDoS attack you'd ne…

You are aware this is exactly what happens under DMCA?

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#157

Post by Kalium »

eiaoa wrote: post #151
flukus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet. 3. Distribution. News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits…

> News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone. A viable, independent media is vital to a well-functioning democracy. I just realized that the implication decision behind of all this talk (about how the new media nee…

> Capitalism is given a higher priority than democracy.

Given the American historical experience with politically aligned papers, I think we might be well-advised to consider the failure modes of state-owned media. To put it another way, we rely on capitalism to support democracy because the alternatives we've tried did not produce a vibrant, independent media. Instead, they produces one bound and beholden to our politics.

Have you ever wondered what the "Free" in "Detroit Free Press" referred to?

But, let's skip past that for the moment. Let's assume that infinite independence is possible. How does one go about having effective press at the required local level in a cost-effective way? Being cost-effective is pretty important for anything that might need to function without being profitable, after all.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#158

Post by thanosnose »

vorpalhex wrote: post #41
Kurtz79 wrote: post #12

"Traffic of news sites depends heavily on Google." It seems counterintuitive to me, at least for my use case. I rarely search for "news", I have a handful of websites to which I usually go to for them. I might search the name in Google if for whatever reason it doesn't show on the top results when I start typing the name on the search bar, because I'm too lazy to use bookmarks. Do most other people use aggregators or…

Yes, I use aggregators so I don't fall victim (as easily) to echochambers of my own design. All sources are biased, but at least you can hopefully get some idea of the truth by reading differently biased sources.

That used to be a good idea 4 or 5 years ago. Sadly now aggregators are echo chambers themselves due to publisher pressure.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#159

Post by yholio »

sarcasmic wrote: post #114

As usual with upcoming legislation, FUD predominates in the conversation. A reasonable person may be used to parties with vested interests to exaggerate or misrepresent facts, but it's unfortunate when parties from whom you may not expect a clear bias continue to perpetuate uncertainty and doubt. Article 13 states that the measures to seek rightholder approval for user-submitted content "shall be effective and propor…

> It reaffirms the right of publishers to decide how they wish to profit from their work -- if they choose to make it available for the aggregator at no cost, that is their right as well.

That's exactly what the Spanish law has forbidden, with disastrous effects for local media when Google withdrew. I'm not familiar with the text of the Article 11 proposals, but I doubt it includes provisions excluding such a transposition into national law; it's obviously the only way for any implementation of the directive to have any teeth.

Of course, the immediate effect is that the aggregators would refuse to pick any local content and would display only 3rd party sites, from outside the countries afflicted with the toxic link syndrome.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#160

Post by thanosnose »

throw2016 wrote: post #105

This article is a one sided look at how publishers benefit from Google without considering the other side, at all. This is not helpful for informed discussion. If Google is 'helping' these publishers then the counterpoint is these publishers are also 'helping' Google by making the content at their cost in the first place. Without their content what will Google search? Wikipedia, blogs? Without news content google sea…

> Without their content what will Google search? Wikipedia, blogs?

I hope so. The internet was better when news was an afterthought.

> Without news content google search users will not get news context about their search queries so the search engine will lack a critical perspective and become lower quality,

News content is low quality content. It's toxic information pollution.

I wish google/youtube, facebook, reddit, etc would simply ban news company links. It would go a long way to increase quality content and lower toxicity.

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