France rules Google must pay news firms for content • Hacker News Board

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#201

Post by curryst » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 5:09 AM UTC

fllsdf wrote: post #124

Multicomp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> discrimination (i.e. because of its unilateral policy of zero renumeration for all publishers) Umm ianal but isn't saying all publishers don't get paid the opposite of discrimination? If they said some American companies get paid but not french etc I would totally get it.

Inal either but the way the court phrases it in the press release is that google negociated a free use licence with everyone, regardless of their financial situations, using their dominant position on the market to "force" everyone. A way of seeing this is that it might be fine for the big players for national and international news (Le monde, Le figaro ...) , but probably has a much bigger impact on small news outle…

The justification for the remuneration agreement would seem to me to be that each individual news outlet is worth nothing, or very close to nothing, to Google. What provides value to Google is having quality search results about a particular topic in the native language. This is satisfied by some portion of news outlets allowing themselves to be indexed, foreign news sources, and independent sources (i.e. blogs and Twitter).

And my suspicion is that the value to Google is likely inversely proportional to the size of the news source, and I think the smaller publishers are hurting the most. I care to some degree that the NYT shows up in Google (but not much, really) whereas I couldn't care in the least about whether a local news paper in West Virginia is indexed.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#202

Post by curryst » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

neil_s wrote: post #150

I think seeing this as an antagonistic situation between Google and the news sites is less than ideal. Google provides value to the news sites by driving traffic to them, and Publishers provide value to Google by helping provide more complete search results. If we could help the Publishers have more sustainable ways to make meaningful revenues off traffic once it visits the site, they wouldn't be trying to bite the a…

User generated content has vastly decreased the value proposition of newspapers. Looking at sites like Reddit, a lot of users read the headline, maybe skim the first paragraph or two of the article, and then go straight to the comments. Where people would once have read articles from multiple view points about a particular issue, they now read the headline and get opposing views in the comments.

This is exacerbated by the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of news sources all paying someone to write an article about the same bit of information.

The industry is going to end up collapsing to a much smaller number of organizations and they'll likely become profitable as the user views aren't split among so many sources.

Re: France rules Google must pay news firms for content

#203

Post by manfredo » Tue, Apr 14, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

lma21 wrote: post #195

manfredo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Googl…

(nor the original op) Indeed, you're making quite a valid point, and we, as users of Google's services, have accepted this policy the day we started using their services for free. Don't want Google to benefit off your browsing-data? you can stop using their services. Now, the question becomes, is that actually possible? If I stop using Google Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc. would they stop collecting my "user data"? I c…

If you stopped using their services they wouldn't be able to collect your user data.