Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by blackeyeblitzar » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:03 PM UTC

jtriangle wrote: post #71

estebarb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case Google should pay everyone they link to, not just the ones with politician friends that can lobby for themselves. If they don't want a Google to index them they can use robots.txt to prevent it.

Exactly. If google showing your site in search results is a problem, it's trivial to remove yourself from said search results, and to prevent your site from ever being crawled in the first place. What's actually happening here is that news media orgs were in a huge bubble because of the advent of the internet, and they've failed to monetize effectively. So they're looking for a revenue source to shore up their failed…

I think you’re ignoring that there is a path to getting to users/customers for many types of products like news, which are the tightly controlled platforms of giant tech companies (Google, Meta, etc), and there isn’t viability for products like news unless they play ball with these big tech companies. It’s not that they haven’t monetized effectively, but rather that there are gatekeepers in the way with no real competition, who can steal your margin by showing part of your news story. All of this is really a classic problem of anti-trust, and what a monopoly is today is different from the past but we haven’t acknowledged this properly in my view.

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

#82

Post by refulgentis » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

bevekspldnw wrote: post #72

refulgentis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Google until October 2023, the blog post is in bad faith. This is a good comment that gets at why[1], TL;DR: the hedge fund thing is a complete nonsequitur. The programs are the equivalent of Google Cloud grants, and Google actively disinvested from News[2] just because that was an easy place to get your mandated Sundar cuts for Wall Street. They're not a good steward of anything other than their stock pr…

The link tax is a red herring and a poor understanding on the part of legislators. The real issue is pre-adtech publishers kept 100% of ad revenue and double click now takes a massive cut (which they briefly touch on). All that cash flowing into MTV is real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away - it’s also the reason search is entering a utility collapse curve since AI can generate unlimited click bait. Dou…

Cheers -- I didn't know that. Interesting parallel to the 30% app store wars: people can argue till they're blue in the face with analogy after analogy, and I can easily talk myself into either perspective being obviously correct...

...at the end of the day, I'd be happy to see a tax pass, some mix of what you put excellently as "real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away", and I imagine similar to you given your MTV reference, experiencing there wasn't really anything special going on at BigCo. It's plain old economic inefficiency, not poor beleaguered good guy G that's always looking out for news and just trying to organize the world's information.

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

#83

Post by blackeyeblitzar » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:05 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #16

baggy_trough wrote: post #4

A tax on linking is absurd and would be deeply harmful.

Tax on linking = less linking. The whole thing smells like wealth distribution ("hmm, the journalism industry is struggling, but the tech industry is booming. The tech industry interacts with the journalism industry, maybe we can help the journalism industry by mandating a new wealth gradient flowing from one to support the other?")

I’m very pro capitalism but I do think redistribution makes sense in the context of giant corporations that are effectively immune to competition. Why do you think Google and Amazon and others can create entire products that never make a profit for years and then unceremoniously shut them down or reduce their investments in them? Everyone else has to try to survive based on their merits and actually make money. Platform owners can be very abusive because those dependent on the platform can have no choice and no voice to speak up. We see this everywhere - whether it is Amazon’s abuse of third party sellers or Google’s abuse of content creators (including news) or Apple’s abuse of app developers. We don’t need to craft a bunch of very targeted laws to reign this in - we just need to split them up and tax any company with market cap above $500B heavily.

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

#84

Post by bloppe » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:06 PM UTC

ikidd wrote: post #70

bloppe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tax applies only to Google. It doesn't apply to any other tech company, and it never will. The DMA at least provides more-or-less objective criteria for what constitutes a "gatekeeper", but this is literally a private deal between Canada and Google. I don't have a problem with publishers getting a greater share of ad revenue, but there are better ways to do it. The govt could increase taxes on ad exchanges categ…

It applied to Facebook/Meta and any larger social media sites. Meta just shut it down and any direct contributions to journalism that they were making, and now the publishers are crying because their traffic has plummetted, to the surprise of precisely nobody except them. Not sure where you're getting your information.

I'm talking about the Guardian article in the grandparent comment. It's a private deal between Google and the Canadian govt.

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

#85

Post by timothyduong » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:10 PM UTC

Catch 22? Let the robots scrape cause you want to be indexed, but at the same time, you don’t want to give the data scraped away for free.

I mean realistically, shouldn’t the news outlets just not let those articles be scraped and be done with this debate?

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

#86

Post by timothyduong » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:13 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #44

flavius29663 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. If you're profiting from it, it's not a bad idea.

If I run a newsletter that links to interesting properties for sale, should I be charged a fee for this?

Maybe if your newsletter gets billions of subscribers and you’re making stacks from it, according to news outlets, yes

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

#87

Post by kerkeslager » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:15 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #47

kerkeslager wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like the threat isn't credible because they came back.

They came back after the law was repealed.

Citation? I'm not seeing that anywhere.

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

#88

Post by darby_eight » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:18 PM UTC

topspin wrote: post #12

darby_eight wrote: post #7

I'm actually ok with this given that google is the source of the internet's dependency on advertisements as its sole method of reliable income for non-subscribers. They are more than welcome to reintroduce less destructive methods of transacting over content.

> given that google is the source of the internet's dependency on advertisements I remember the internet before Google. There were lots of ads. It was great watching animated GIF ads load at 56 Kbps. There were pop-up adds and crazy obnoxious flashing ads and NSFW ads. Google didn't create all of that: the ad-sphere was alive and kicking long before anyone heard of Google.

> Google didn't create all of that: the ad-sphere was alive and kicking long before anyone heard of Google.

I never said they did. Hell, print publications were nearly as bad as the internet has become—marketing is simply a large societal problem we have no solution for. I still place the blame for lack of other funding models squarely on them—any other funding model would have undercut their entire existence, and no other company has had such a profound impact on the web (particularly with the demise of netscape).

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

#89

Post by freedomben » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:18 PM UTC

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #81

jtriangle wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If google showing your site in search results is a problem, it's trivial to remove yourself from said search results, and to prevent your site from ever being crawled in the first place. What's actually happening here is that news media orgs were in a huge bubble because of the advent of the internet, and they've failed to monetize effectively. So they're looking for a revenue source to shore up their failed…

I think you’re ignoring that there is a path to getting to users/customers for many types of products like news, which are the tightly controlled platforms of giant tech companies (Google, Meta, etc), and there isn’t viability for products like news unless they play ball with these big tech companies. It’s not that they haven’t monetized effectively, but rather that there are gatekeepers in the way with no real compe…

If that's true (and I agree that it is), then charging for links is going to make it even worse and effectively cement that reality for all time. How is a startup who can't afford to pay employees, let alone publishers, supposed to come by and provide some alternative?

Possibly perhaps, the big publishers (with deep pockets and lobbyists) really like this approach because despite entrenching big tech, it erects formidable barriers to entry for new upstart competitors to them? Regulatory capture is a tried and true tactic for industries that reach a certain size.

IMHO society is a lot better off trying to prevent summarization efforts (that eliminate the need for the user to visit the page) than they are trying to charge for links. The latter is something that benefits everyone regardless of size. I'm not necessarily in favor of doing that either (would need to think it through a lot more, because it would essentially legislate a worse user experience, which is not something to be done without serious deliberation), but it seems like a much more relevant fight to have and one that isn't so self-serving.

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

#90

Post by AJ007 » Fri, Apr 12, 2024, 7:19 PM UTC

timothyduong wrote: post #85

Catch 22? Let the robots scrape cause you want to be indexed, but at the same time, you don’t want to give the data scraped away for free. I mean realistically, shouldn’t the news outlets just not let those articles be scraped and be done with this debate?

Well it's more like, we want free traffic and also pay us for the privilege of sending it to us. That isn't happening and it isn't the way traffic works. Pay news organizations for the rights to republish the articles on Google (e.g. Reuters or AP feeds)? That's a business model. It also means the small one off news sites are dead.

Once all of the third party cookie stuff dies, meaningful display ad revenue for non-mega publishers (Google, Facebook, Amazon) will evaporate. These news organizations are dead men walking already and the debate is a waste of time at this point.