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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

#181

Post by CPLX »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #41
falcor84 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any conflict between wanting the federal government to be small, while still wanting that federal government to be in charge of some things - this is literally the reason for having a federation in the first place

The Federal Gov can’t be small and be in charge of all the things at the same time (not your statement but the general expectation I was referring to). It’s a balancing act but we always seem to strive for one extreme or the other.

I wasn’t making any reference to the size of the federal government, I was referencing the first year first day basic concept of separation of powers.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#182

Post by _ofdw »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #164
matheusmoreira wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No. If those French citizens don't voluntarily establish a TCP/IP connection to google.com, they will have no dealings with Google. (Well, that's not entirely true, but it is an entirely separate debate.) If the French government has a beef with anyone, it's with their own people, who stubbornly refuse to use Videotex or whatever the homegrown French alternative is these days. You don't want to go down this path, bel…

>It will destroy the Internet in mind, body, and spirit.

This has already happened, thanks in no small part to Google, Facebook, Cloudflare, and a few other large players. Centralization killed the libertarian dream of the internet as the great equalizing force. Instead the internet is just a massive rich-get-richer surveillance panopticon.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#183

Post by pmart123 »

Sujan wrote: post #2

I wish Google would finally go with the kneejerk reaction of just unlisting all these sites from Google Search and News.

I agree. Google has gotten a lot worse for long tail searches over the last year. My feeling is they felt pressured by major news outlets in the US to only display “trusted” sources. Now I only get company links or nytimes versus an expert blog on the subject matter.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#184

Post by bscphil »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #174
Talanes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the French government has a beef with anyone, it's with their own people, who stubbornly refuse to use Videotex or whatever the homegrown French alternative is these days. This isn't a gang war for turf, France does not "have a beef" with Google. They have made laws for their country, and are enforcing those laws. Google has the freedom to comply or GTFO, simple as that.

Mountain View, California is already a long way TFO of France.

https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/?company=Google&comp...

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#185

Post by bscphil »

blakesterz wrote: post #5

I think this is the actual judgement? https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/fr/communiques-de-pre... This techcrunch post has more details than Reuters: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/frances-competition-watchd... Abusive practices the agency says it suspects Google of at this stage of its investigation are: The imposition of unfair trading conditions; circumvention of the law; and discrimination (i.e. because of…

> The imposition of unfair trading conditions

I'm not clear on the legal details but this confused me. I would have supposed under most sane legal systems that there's no "trading conditions" that are relevant here, because there is (or ought to be) no trade. In most jurisdictions, you can crawl a website and present small snippets of its content under fair use to the public, without having to have any kind of agreement with the publisher.

If that's the case in France, then I don't see how Google is "trading" with these publishers at all. Is this not the case in France?

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#187

Post by manfredo »

hedora wrote: post #110
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are lucky then that you are literally wrong. Neither FB nor Google are selling your data to anyone.

Selling targeting information about me is a form of “selling my data”. Out of $160b in revenue in 2019, $134b of Google’s revenue came from ads. Most of the ad revenue is in the form of targeted ads, so if they stopped selling people’s information, they’d immediately go under. Similar numbers apply to Facebook. I honestly don’t understand where this argument that those companies don’t sell people’s information comes…

Nor are they selling targeted information. When I purchase ads targeting a specific demographic, I don't get to see who was served ads. I could correlate this with new customers following the ad campaign, but the same could be done by airing TV ads in specific households and doing the same correlation.

You seem to have a much more expansive idea of what selling information means as compared to other commenters. Google collects information so that when a customer buys ads, they can serve those ads to the desired demographics. They don't sell info on which users belong to which demographics or other otherwise sell user information. While it's true that they monetize information in optimizing their ad placement, this is not what most people think of when they hear "selling user information.

Say I have a nail salon and I want to advertise. So I give out coupons to bakeries, coffee shops, etc. and tell storekeepers to hand out the coupons the customer's demographics (women, mostly, and maybe women with fancy nails in particular). When these storekeepers kept an eye out for women with fancy nails and gave them my coupon, did the sell their customer's information?

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#188

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#189

Post by enz »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #174
Talanes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the French government has a beef with anyone, it's with their own people, who stubbornly refuse to use Videotex or whatever the homegrown French alternative is these days. This isn't a gang war for turf, France does not "have a beef" with Google. They have made laws for their country, and are enforcing those laws. Google has the freedom to comply or GTFO, simple as that.

Mountain View, California is already a long way TFO of France.

"Google France" is a French company, with headquarters in Paris. They have employees and they do business under the French law like any other French company.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#190

Post by slavak »

droithomme wrote: post #180
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The statement that Google is a monopoly isn't really debatable. OK, let's not debate. We'll just agree that the statement is empirically false.

A monopoly is not _just_ a company that controls 100% of the market. If pure monopolies were the only kind the term referred to it would be all but useless.

https://bizfluent.com/about-6601606-monopoly-economics-.html

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