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Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

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Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#231

Post by trogdor »

tomcar288 wrote: post #95

why can't the news outlets just charge people when they arrive on the site? just paywall it and let people read the article for like 5 cents or something? i know this has been tried and supossedly didn't work. but why not? I would gladly be willing to pay 5 cents to read an article I like but I sure as hell am not going to shell out 250$+ yearly subscription for it (just to read one article), like most news sites do…

As far as I know, there is no good way to process transactions on the order of a few cents. Micropayments are hard.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#232

Post by suddenexample »

News organizations are doing important work and I completely sympathize with them in a world where companies are claiming that they can replace your entire company with an ML model.

But I totally agree with the other comments that linking should not be something that you can demand payment for. And I find it equally absurd that they're demanding payment from platforms that funnel users over to them in the first place.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#233

Post by dmazzoni »

ninkendo wrote: post #213
bawolff wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair - that's what news sites do - they summarize information happening elsewhere. Its hard to claim google is in the wrong for doing to news sites what news sites have been doing to other people since forever.

At some point someone is actually doing journalism though (in the best case at least.) News outlets that summarize things from e.g. Reuters or AP tend to have agreements which pay money for the information. You could reasonably argue that google should be doing the same, right?

I think the reality is that journalism was a ridiculously inefficient business.

A big national event happens. News organizations collectively send 30 different reporters to the scene.

Those 30 reporters each write up a firsthand story. Now hundreds of smaller news organizations (local papers, local TV news stations, etc.) rewrite it in their own words and put it in their version.

In the end, for any major story you end up with hundreds of articles being written, but out of those there are only a handful of genuinely different narratives, each retold in slightly different words hundreds of times. It's rare that a local news organization adds any significant value.

In my opinion, NPR is the only organization that gets it right: there's a single national organization that does the news at the top of every hour, and local stations then come on to give local news following that. A single national organization does morning and evening long-form news shows with the national shows, and each local station does its own long-form shows with local news. Very little redundancy.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#234

Post by kccqzy »

javier_e06 wrote: post #147

I agree with California. Just like other computer data brokers, Google services benefit from content creators not all the way around. Pay the human content creators.

The human content creators aren't necessarily paid highly. The news business gets paid. They are merely enriching the likes of Murdoch.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#235

Post by jacobgkau »

jedberg wrote: post #153
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to think about this more, are there any other business types, besides online news, where your success so radically depends on the decisions (read google news ranking and summarization algorithms) of some other business that you have zero relations with. Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in th…

Any retail store. Like Costco and Walmart. They can break an entire company by just buying from a competitor.

I think they key is that in your example, Cosco/Walmart was "buying" from the company and is now "buying" from a competitor. Google's typically not "buying" from anyone when they choose who to list on their pages (only "selling" exposure, in cases of paid advertising).

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#236

Post by Zpalmtree »

babypuncher wrote: post #203
zmmmmm wrote: post #170

I have sympathy for news publishers but I worry a lot about the principle of asserting that linking to something is an act that the link target has proprietary rights to over. At some level, it is almost a free speech issue. If I can't refer to what you are saying, without owing you something, you have power over not just my speech, but a power to limit how your work is subjected to criticism and debate. It's effecti…

If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you. Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them. The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere. It's worse in pla…

Should we be forced to have a worse user experience because the websites don't like it?

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#237

Post by GabeIsko »

At the end of the day, it's the section 230 that should really be re-evalutated right? Google and Facebook can promote lies all day long along side reputable journalism, and then deny all legal liability, because it isn't them saying these things! The market won't decide what is true or not, no matter how many taxes and fees you try to impose.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#238

Post by jacobgkau »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #217
kemayo wrote: post #6

I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.

> It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing Does it? If I summarize a book, do I need to pay a fee? News (much like recipes) is not directly covered by copyright (facts cannot be copyrighted). Only the expression (exact wording) is (which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story).

Legality aside, I can understand how reading a short news article (especially when paying only via ad views) and then summarizing information that lots of people are probably interested in right at this moment is likely to be more detrimental to a writer's business model than reading an entire book (possibly after purchasing a copy) and then summarizing information that's likely to be less timely.
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