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France rules Google must pay news firms for content

reuters.com

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Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#151

Post by Talanes »

drenvuk wrote: post #54
smogcutter wrote: post #29

I get that HN hates journalists, but other than that I don’t see why people are on google’s side here. Is it about personal convenience? If you want to scrape someone else’s work and display it next to your own ads, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask you to pay up.

Your misunderstanding of the situation is pretty apparent. Google displays snippets, France says pay up if you display any content that's not a title, legally. Google says "ok but we're still not going to pay" and nixes the snippets and only keeps the title. Court says, that's not how the law should be interpreted even though it's a pretty fair interpretation, pay them anyway for the last 6 months and negotiate. Scra…

>Court says, that's not how the law should be interpreted even though it's a pretty fair interpretation, pay them anyway for the last 6 months and negotiate.

They key thing you're missing is that Google DID keep most of it's snippet content by getting the newspapers to sign free agreements. Google WAS given the option to just display nothing, they did not take it.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#152

Post by matheusmoreira »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #136
matheusmoreira wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is Google should have more power and authority than actual nations.

More power than France? Yeah. For one thing, Google is not a French company, so there's no reasonable justification for France to exert any control over them. For another, it seems clear that one of the key lessons of the 21st century is that democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's essentially government by the majority of a population that's almost evenly distributed on the IQ bell curve. In a stark contrast…

> For one thing, Google is not a French company, so there's no reasonable justification for France to exert any control over them.

There is ample justification. They are dealing with french citizens on french soil. Google could have chosen to block all of France instead, thereby losing all the revenue it derives from the french people. It didn't.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#153

Post by renewiltord »

Talanes wrote: post #137
renewiltord wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the dream. When governments cannot simply impose their will on me at a whim. The fault isn't that Google can negotiate as an equal. The fault is that I can't negotiate as an equal when I want to marry a man or abort a foetus or drug myself. And I'd rather erode the power of the government than of myself every single time. And I'm pretty sure the French people don't get to decide what I want. Only I get to deci…

>And I'm pretty sure the French people don't get to decide what I want. Only I get to decide that. Great. You don't get to decide what the French people want either.

Haha, that's exactly right. But what they get is the end of the negotiation that occurs and it won't necessarily be what they want.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#154

Post by bgorman »

samatman wrote: post #111
bgorman wrote: post #94

The problem is that "press freedom" as a right should not mean "The press MUST receive leads through all search engines and the search engines MUST pay for doing so". "Press freedom" historically means that the press can publish anything factual, artistic, or opinion based without fear of government censorship or retribution. We are seeing the EU and various EU countries redefine fundamental terms for entirely differ…

> the country that was the inspiration for the US independence. The United States declared independence in 1776, and the storming of the Bastille was in 1789. I'm pretty sure the arrow of causality runs in the opposite direction from what you describe.

Clearly factually my statement is incorrect. However there certainly was a lot of cross-polination of enlightenment ideas between the early US, France and England.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#155

Post by Talanes »

kevindong wrote: post #39
smogcutter wrote: post #29

I get that HN hates journalists, but other than that I don’t see why people are on google’s side here. Is it about personal convenience? If you want to scrape someone else’s work and display it next to your own ads, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask you to pay up.

I don't necessarily disagree about Google being required to pay publishers to make money off of having snippets of their content in Google News. But requiring Google to both index all websites (in a separate attempt to mitigate the monopoly effect) and requiring Google to pay publishers to include content in search results certainly has a bad smell to it. If Google had the option to not index the websites, then I'd s…

Google did have the option. They chose instead to pressure newspapers into signing free agreements to add their content back. Google obviously thought it had found a loop around the law, and the French courts saw through it.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#156

Post by ocdtrekkie »

droithomme wrote: post #142
Reventlov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the decision covers the fact google search is a monopoly. Not google news. Google, being in a monopoly position in terms of search, can forces newspaper to provide their data for free, which is unfair. If google wasn't in a monopoly (for search), it wouldn't be a problem. So, yes, indeed, Google can stop providing search for the whole France.

> the fact google search is a monopoly Except it's not. I never use Google, I use DuckDuckGo. If DDG fails I try Bing. I have google and facebook domains blocked from access in my system because I don't like their tracking. Lots of other people search without Google. Google is simply not a monopoly in the search game.

Google has over 90% of search market share in Europe. The statement that Google is a monopoly isn't really debatable.

And the fact that you can use another search engine doesn't change the power Google has, because everyone else uses Google. So your website has to play by Google's rules if you want to be found.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#157

Post by zajio1am »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #136
matheusmoreira wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is Google should have more power and authority than actual nations.

More power than France? Yeah. For one thing, Google is not a French company, so there's no reasonable justification for France to exert any control over them. For another, it seems clear that one of the key lessons of the 21st century is that democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's essentially government by the majority of a population that's almost evenly distributed on the IQ bell curve. In a stark contrast…

> For another, it seems clear that one of the key lessons of the 21st century is that democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Well, that is nothing new. The idea that major threat to freedom in modern states is not from detached power elite but from the society itself is a major theme of "On Liberty" from J. S. Mill.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#159

Post by Talanes »

xenocyon wrote: post #52
smogcutter wrote: post #29

I get that HN hates journalists, but other than that I don’t see why people are on google’s side here. Is it about personal convenience? If you want to scrape someone else’s work and display it next to your own ads, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask you to pay up.

Besides the "us vs them" attitude with regard to journalists, HN is often strangely nationalistic as well, so that makes for a double whammy in this case.

We've also got a nice strain of citizen-of-the-world, anti-nation types.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#160

Post by travisoneill1 »

smogcutter wrote: post #29

I get that HN hates journalists, but other than that I don’t see why people are on google’s side here. Is it about personal convenience? If you want to scrape someone else’s work and display it next to your own ads, it doesn’t seem crazy to ask you to pay up.

Because France said "you can't display snippets unless you pay", so Google stopped displaying snippets. So then France said "you have to display snippets and pay." The object here is obviously not consistent application of the law, but rather extraction of money from Google. Furthermore, there are no ads on Google News.
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