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.
I actually agree with it too. Google and Facebook aren't the reason news outlets have cash problems and a free teat to latch on to isn't the answer. News is important, but let's fix the problem in a better way.
Facts are not copyrightable, so the meat of a story spreads quickly and with very little money changing hands. One subscriber to the Los Angeles Times can legally and immediately share the factual essence of an article via social media, personal web site, email, or anything else. From there it can be reshared indefinitely. Only people who really want to read the original reporting in full will pay to subscribe to the LA Times.
There used to be regional/temporal barriers in place before the Web was popular; newspapers had geographically limited distribution and it took time to print a new edition. One newspaper "scooping" another by one day was all it took to get people to buy the one-day-earlier publication. Also, 20th century newspapers collected significant revenue from classified advertising, people buying the paper just to get a weather forecast, and other kinds of information distribution that really didn't have anything to do with investigative news. The Web unbundled all that (weather.gov, Craigslist, etc.) and the only remaining strength of newspapers was producing original reporting. Which, unfortunately, was never all that profitable on its own even before you get to the "facts are not copyrightable" issue that I mentioned in my first paragraph.
Does anyone have any good pages on that which go into how to extract facts without copyright infringement? And for purposes of creating independent, educational works from those facts?
The value proposition in the internet age is too low to demand the price neccessary to support it. This created a race to the bottom in order to keep the lights on. This further degraded the value of the product. This caused people to value it less, and so on.
The end result is reputable news sites became clickbait and eventually people stopped caring.
There is still a market for in depth journalism, and we see a rise in that sort of things. There are plenty of youtube channels doing documentary-like videos on current events. That is journalism.
The journalism that is dying is the stuff concentrating on breaking news. If its shallow its outcompeted by twitter. If its higher quality but still racing to the headline, its outcompeted by wikipedia. The fact is the competitors to breaking news journalism are cheaper and higher quality.
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for journalism, but it has to be journalism above and beyond the basic info that you can get for free online. The basic news is commoditized and freely available online, and that's what a lot of traditional newspapers are competing with. However, paid industry journalism like The Information is something people are willing to pay for - or get their companies to pay for at least.
Also, I think traditional newspapers should position themselves so they're not competing with the lowest common denominator of basic info, however due to cutbacks, most newspapers are in essence not doing very much in depth journalism anymore, which means they are unfortunately positioning themselves as competing with any other source of news.
In simple terms; lots of competition and much of it is free. If you want basic breaking news, it's all over social media (often from the news sites themselves). If you want sports, tech, gaming, music, entertainment, art or other hobby style news, it's literally on two million websites and forums and YouTube channels specifically made for that one topic, and usually done better than in a newspaper.
So while you could say a decent chunk of the replacement content is worse than what traditional news outlets could offer, it's at least free and exists by the bucket load, meaning the incentive for paying for it is nonexistent for most of the population. Meanwhile the more niche stuff is both free and done better elsewhere, so RIP anyone making money off that anymore.
To make things tougher, getting advertisers to pay for it is becoming a lost cause too, since again, they can advertise in places where metrics and tracking options are better. They'll get way more bang for their buck on social media than they will trying to market on a news site or in a classifieds section or what not.
To expand, journalists used to actually investigate which took time which means it took money so that the story released had lots of corroborating sources, scrutinized by editors, and then released as a complete story. That might have meant things like actually interviewing people, requesting documents from places, or visiting the places in question.
Today, it is just a bunch of people collecting tweets of random people on the interwebs. Race to publish before competition means there's no time for editorial review of simple things like grammar and coherent thoughts let alone accuracy, so lots of FUD can be spread very quickly as "news".
Those well thought out articles are also considered too long and boring and get reposted on socials as TL;DR as if it were their own thoughts.
We used to make fun of the microwave generation with "I want it now" type comments. Now, it's I need it in less than 140chars, or I'm scrolling past it.
The death spiral you describe is like a train wreck that you can do nothing about.
The most infuriating thing is that an article can take absolutely any stance on an issue simply by cherry picking tweets to go along with it.
News has become a weird kind of curation market. And the funny thing about this payment arrangement that publishers want is that they are not paying any of those tweeters who may be breaking the news or themselves curating the info.
If I see tweets in any article other than tweets from the people that the article is about, I will throw that news site in the dust bin. Using tweets as evidence or as anything important tells me that news site is definitely in a death spiral. I think the only place I put up with it is on the local news and even then I'm gritting my teeth.
Why would you pay someone for a tweet? They posted it for free. Collecting tweets isn't journalism. Asking the user for more than 140 chars about what they are witnessing along with multiple others would then be closer to journalism. Tweets are just people self identifying who journalists could be interviewing. The interview allows for follow up to the tweet.
> To expand, journalists used to actually investigate which took time which means it took money so that the story released had lots of corroborating sources, scrutinized by editors, and then released as a complete story. That might have meant things like actually interviewing people, requesting documents from places, or visiting the places in question.
This was only desired and seen as useful and interesting when people had nothing else to do.
Yeah lots of people don't really want to just read the news, they want to discuss it. Most people on reddit have stopped opening news article links entirely since there's always a comment or two that summarize it without having to wade through the sludge of ads and autoplaying videos, or worse, wasting your time reading the first sentence and then getting hit by a paywall. News sites are one of the most user hostile places on the internet.
I think very few people ever "paid for news" -- the newsroom of most publications have always been highly subsidized by advertising and classifieds, and perhaps newstand sales. Google (and others) and Craigslist (and others) quickly dominated advertising and classifieds in the early 2000s, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone reading a newspaper on a train
The circulation subscriptions were a substantial part of their revenue, however you're right that ads were even larger. I don't think it's fair to say few people ever paid for it though. Subscriptions were important too.
Back when newspapers were healthy, basically there was all this stuff that was bundled with the actual news that was of more immediate utility to people: classifieds, movie reviews, comics, coupons. And there was less competition for people's leisure time.
News is now in a very competitive leisure time landscape and is debundled from stuff that's of high value, and most people just don't care that much about news. They'll read it when it's around but they won't pay for it. The ones who are willing to pay for it mostly just subscribe to the New York Times because in a nationalized news environment why not go for the biggest producer.
> most people just don't care that much about news
I stopped caring about what was happening on the world stage in 2022, and it has been sublime. I hear about the big things from friends and random folks, and it gives some instant conversation starters (“oh no, I hadn’t heard about that”). The only news I actually care about is local news, and I skim the newsletter my (small) city publishes on Fridays.
Given that, there is zero value provided to me by traditional media publishers. I say this as someone who gets NYT, WSJ, WaPo, and FT for free through work. I don’t use them, because I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
No judgement here though—if reading the paper is your thing and you like staying informed, that’s great and I fully support it. Just offering my perspective.
I think that is a part of it, but its not just that.
News provied two services in the old days: access and filtering.
Back in the day you couldn't easily get things straight from the horses mouth, now you can just go to their website.
If you did have direct access in the old days, it was all way too much. There was no way to filter to 10-minutes worth of top goings on. Now a days you can just look at what is upvoted and stop once you have read enough.
Completely agree with all this, though my take away is that there's a big vicious cycle of adblockers and paywalls where they keep getting worse. I can't afford to subscribe to every newspaper I read. All the local (and smaller national) papers should unionize and make one subscription for something like $20 a month
There is everything wrong with that if that wasn’t the deal to begin with. You’re paying for information and they’re deliberately injecting noise in the signal. It’s degrading the quality of what you’re paying for without a commensurate adjustment in the rate.
I’m not sure I agree that news is more competitive now within its own business? (I’m not sure what the Danish branche is in English), but rather that there are just so many things competing for people’s attention in general. With SoMe being actively designed to be addictive through various algorithms I think it’s only natural that people spend more of their time on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit or even HackerNews. I think that is time that a lot of people would’ve otherwise spend on news.
Add to this the introduction of terrible news media. The spam and click bait media, where you get the articles for free but the articles you get are basically worse than what you’d find anywhere else because they are most there to generate revenue from advertising. Stuff that gives “traditional” news media a very bad image. Further add the media platforms which are now straight up political propaganda, which some always where, but now they are owned by very few people and push very divisive agendas which is a little different from the past where they were more inline with each other and the “general” aristocracy rather than a few billionaires/oligarchs and you gain the general media perception even more. Both are rightfully so.
In a sense you get what you pay for though. If you’re not paying you’re not getting quality news. You can see this in Danish news very clearly, where only a handful of news papers still do actual critical journalism and the rest mainly do opinions or click-bait articles on current events that you might as well read on Facebook. Not because Facebook does anything particularly in that department but because the contractors who sell stories and pictures to the “free” news media typically also post their content elsewhere for increased revenue on their part.
As far as going to the “biggest” most “cultural” news media I totally agree with you. In my country people read Weekend Avisen, and then add one of the more politically inclined subscription papers based on their views. But basically it boils down to thee papers, one that is slightly more conservative (which in Scandinavian/American optics would make it almost socialist), one that is left-leaning (again, very socialist in American optics) and one that is based on Christianity (but extremely moderate, as in pro abortion and gay marriage).
Aside from that there are two “localised” papers which either focus heavily on Copenhagen or the part of our country which is called Jylland.
Almost none of these papers would be alive without government subsidies. Because the only two papers which actually makes money are Weekendavisen (our NYT) and the Christian paper which doesn’t actually make money but is subsidised by various Christian groups.
Many people are willing to pay for news. Enough that it will keep coming in excess. Just not enough to sustain the scale and production values of yesteryear.
Plenty of independent journalists are out there doing just fine and even some of the big outlets have adjusted effectively. But in the internet age we don't need hundreds of outlets all reporting on the same stories 24/7 - especially when most of those stories have no impact on the viewers/readers.
The market is simply adjusting and the old establishment is going down kicking and screaming.
I don't think the issue is that people aren't willing to pay for it. The problem is, there aren't currently good options for paying for it. If I go to a news site and it is paywalled, I just leave. I am not going to subscribe to every single newspaper. If I could easily pay for today's paper (not an individual news story or a full subscription) without giving up all my persona info, I would probably buy 2 - 3 papers a day from various sources.
And if you want the best news you have to pay for more than WaPo.
Besides, if you actually like to read why would you be buying washington post? People who like to read usually aren't going into 5 minute long shallow articles, they are getting a book on the topic.
What exactly is being "monetized" when a search result is displayed for a news article that will bring the users to news site where they'll earn ad money to the news outlet?
The news outlet can use robots.txt to prevent indexing. If Google doesn't bring them value, there's the easy answer.
>but that's not what this is about, this is about charging for linking to news articles.
Sure, but these things are directly related. It's the scraping that generates the links in question and ultimately earns Google ad revenue. And, if they did pay on the scraping side, then charging for linking would be less relevant. As it is, they're collecting the content, but not paying on either end.
So, it seems if you agree they should pay for the scraping (but they are not), then you wouldn't be opposed to them paying on the other end. In fact, this might be fairer to Google b/c it's pay for performance.
But, more to the point, I was responding to OP's specific-claim that the news sites were attempting to "latch on to a free teat".
"scraping" usually refers to unauthorized access for the purposes of using that content for something else. what google does to generate search result pages is usually called "indexing", and websites go out of their way to encourage google to do more of it.
Understood. I use the term "scraping" loosely and, admittedly, purposely. I think it's illustrative of the broader point I was attempting to make.
But, if you really want to be precise, what Google actually does is more commonly (and euphemistically) referred to as "crawling". And, it is more accurate to say that they are crawling for the purpose of indexing what they've crawled. Crawling is essentially the front end of an overall process which ends with indexed results.
Whatever the nomenclature you prefer, the effect is the same, and so is my point.
>websites go out of their way to encourage google
I understand that some websites "encourage" Google, and that intersects with the alternative point of view I've been suggesting. That is, that Google is monopolistic in its traffic ownership and the content owners have little choice but to offer their content to be freely monetized by Google. It's also worth pointing out that there are some businesses which are built around SEO from the ground up while others—like news outlets—pre-existed Google but now rely on them to survive. These are different.
To further close the loop, my suggestion was that the original topic of this thread might also be seen as somewhat of a remedy for that effect. And, frankly, it's strange to me that you will allow that Google should be paying sites for their scraping or crawling or whatever, but don't seem to be connecting it to my point, when it really could be viewed as an alternative remedy to the problem I'm describing.
Overall, I believe mine is a more interesting and accurate way to look at the problem than to simply accept that Google has intermediated so many content sites and their consumers as some natural and universally right state of affairs.
In any case, I don't think Google's search business model or that SEO is a thing, etc. is lost on anyone on HN. And, thought I might encounter more interesting discussion here around my view. But it seems most people here have accepted that Google just owns the traffic and everybody must play along. Further, that it's really for their own good. I suppose it's become harder to imagine a world where content producers own their content and are not coerced into giving it away for need of traffic from a single monopolistic source without whom their business might not survive.
But, it's somewhat surprising when I zoom out and think about the spirit of "hacking" and the audience that used to more predominantly frequent HN. Thinking back to staunch support of folks like Aaron Swartz and other topics. Maybe I'm the only one who sees these as somewhere along the same continuum. And that's fine.
Nonetheless, I find this discussion tedious and boring by now, as I'm sure others do my "alternative perspective". So, let's just agree to disagree, rather than have these pedantic restatements of definitions and Google's well-known search business model as if these are somehow dispositive.
Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of a symbiotic relationship. Google gets a useful news page, the news media get links to their articles.
I honestly could care less about either of them. I think they should just fight it out on their own and keep our legal system and tax payers time and money out of it.
>Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of a symbiotic relationship.
There's definitely some symbiosis here, but it's ultimately Google that's dependent on the news (and other) sites' content, which it gets for free. That is, the news sites (and other content providers) could exist without Google. But, Google could not exist without their content.
At least that's my observation. So, I wasn't picking a side as much as earnestly asking how OP concluded that its the news sites wanting something free from Google versus the other way around.
Those sites rely on sites like Facebook and Google linking to their content to lead readers in. With the ban on Canada their public campaign has made that obvious.
>Those sites rely on sites like Facebook and Google linking to their content to lead readers in
Of course, that's the way it is. But, is it a good thing that they've intermediated all of the world's content?
It's easy to argue that the problem is exactly that a relative handful of sites have a monopoly on traffic and, what's more, they've gained that monopoly for free.
30 seconds of serious thought would tell you that your observation is wrong.
Again, a news organization can just change their robots.txt to block google from indexing their site.
They don't do that because that would instantly kill all their search traffic... and most likely kill their business.
If CNN changed their robots.txt to stop being indexed by Google, Google would literally lose 0 users.
> I wasn't picking a side as much as earnestly asking how OP concluded that its the news sites wanting something free from Google versus the other way around.
It's been explained to you several times. Instead you're more interested in acting self-righteous (it's honestly pretty cringeworthy).
>30 seconds of serious thought would tell you that your observation is wrong.
Or, maybe I just have a different opinion.
>news organization can just change their robots.txt to block google from indexing their site
You don't seem to have thought beyond this superficial robots.txt "solution". Yes, we all know that option is available. But, as I've self-righteously offered for consideration, Google is one of a few sites that essentially monopolizes traffic generation, so they've positioned themselves to make it untenable for sites to block Google's crawling (and free monetization) of their content.
Cory Doctorow has (another) recent Twitter thread on how tech monopolies have grown virtually unchecked and now abuse the ecosystems in which they operate, increasingly clawing back more value for themselves at the expense of others. IMO this fits the pattern. Look it up. You might find it interesting. Or not.
>They don't do that because that would instantly kill all their search traffic...and most likely kill their business.
And there you've just stated exactly the problem I'm referencing, with apparently zero awareness of how someone could find it problematic. I mean, you just said "they could solve the problem by blocking Google via robots.txt, but that would kill their business".
So, not exactly a solution then, right?
It's baffling that you can say this but still angrily scream that "It's robots.txt! Case closed!"
>It's been explained to you several times. Instead you're more interested in acting self-righteous (it's honestly pretty cringeworthy).
You clearly don't hear yourself. Calm down.
EDIT: out of curiosity, I just took a quick look at your recent comments to others. One of the first to pop up was this:
>What are you even talking about? That's not how SEO works in the slightest....?
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 the economy?
EDIT: the criteria of zero business relationship between your entire product class and the Big Business is critical; otherwise lots of examples exist.
There isn't a single physical product that's not beholden to the Walmarts of the world to stock, market and highlight those products. There isn't a single farmer in this world that isn't dependant on stores buying off their produce and putting it into shelves.
Heck, even in paper era, there wasn't a single paper not beholden to kiosks and other stores to put their papers into racks and into premium places where customers are most likely to pick them up. Do you hink NYTimes demanded that street vendors pay them for the privilege of putting their paper onto a rack?!
Having fully vertically integrated bussiness (like you're mentioning) is a very modern development of monopolies.
Newspapers obviously sold their paper to the paper kiosks, who then sold it to customers. Hence a business relationship between the two types of entities.
In the Google News case, no news sites sells their news to Google News. There is no business relation between Google News or any de jure contact whatsoever between the two. It's different. I am not saying its good or bad, or that this gives the right to the news sites for news sites to demand payments from Google.
But I think its a weird scenario that doesn't occur in other markets. And to understand the pathologies of the online news business, we need to think about this particular no-relations fact.
Virtually every product and service with a website and social media presence? If you get banned from Google, your visibility online pretty much falls off a cliff and your sales will likely never recover. So anyone making money from a website is dependent on Google and other search engines... well mostly Google indexing said site.
Also, any business whose livelihood depends on a large company's platform. Businesses and entrepreneurs selling their work on Amazon and eBay, YouTubers and Twitch streamers making content for those platforms, influencers in general given their reliance on social media services...
Except for Google search+product combo, in every other example you cited there is a contractual relation between the product and the SM.
If I have a product page on Facebook, I have a contract with Facebook. Facebook could choose to end that contract with me and close my account. But Google News blocking/downranking a news site does not involve any contract ending between Google News and the news site. If I don't have a product page on Facebook, Facebook could still choose to block/downrank posts where users on their own free will mention my product. But I don't think this really happens at any significant scale yet.
Same applies your Amazon/Ebay/Youtube/Twitch examples.
Going back a few decades, newspapers were dependent on the newsstands they were sold out of. They could put your paper higher or lower on the stand (ranking).
Going back not as far, CNN was dependent on your local cable company to deliver their signal to homes. Charter or Comcast could choose to stop carrying a channel altogether.
No matter how hard you try to avoid it, some asshole will always post any video you make to YouTube immediately and probably try to monetize it.
Given how much money Google collects for YouTube, they should get fined through the roof when they allow somebody to upload something they don't have the rights to.
The porn companies showed that you solve this technically. However, Google will fight this to the very end.
There are lots of examples of people who produce things being beholden to a few companies that controls the distribution channels.
A more interesting one is small businesses and payment processors which don't control the distribution but rather keep them operationally dependant on a product they control a monopoly over.
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).
There is a business relationship between Walmart/Costco and the product or a competitor of the product. In the Google News case, there is no business relation with any news site (Alphabet ads might have a relation with the news site, but that is not Google News).
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).
> which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story
I see this claimed often but it doesn't make any sense - anyone can still copy the recipe without the story and then the copy would even provide more value than the original.
Seems to me padding recipes with fluff is mostly about SEO and maximizing ad impressions.
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.
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 price.
I don't like the idea of a link tax but I do know, 100%, that blog post is slanted and mealy-mouthed on everything I know first-hand about.
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.
Double click will end up killing google, it’s already too late to go back.
Google has thoroughly rigged the space, including manipulating bid stream data to underpay publishers while overcharging the advertiser. It’s called Project Bernake which is public now. I have it on reliable sources there is a lot more beyond that.
The search antitrust suit was garbage, but the coming trials in the ad auction suit is going to hurt a lot more. They total lost their way, it’s actually insane when you’ll see what theyve been doing.
Google never stopped “innovating”, they just shifted their innovation to fraud.
Having never read this, current Texas anti-trust lawsuit. [1]
Alleges quite a bit, yet the main four in the article are.
1) Google says it runs a Second Price auction, but really runs a Third Price auction, ignores the 2nd bid, and takes the difference for (shifting purposes). Telling a Publisher they made $8, when they would have made $12.80.
2) Google inflates bids of buyers "to ensure their advertisers beat out bids from competing buying platforms". Artificially making their platform look better economically. Was individual cases, yet now alleged to be a global pool of stolen Publisher money.
3) Gaining access to Publisher's ad-spend behavior with Dynamic Allocation, and then using the info to make sure rival platforms seemed less competitive by manipulating and inflating other bids. Make sure they always seem to lose by $0.01 on every bid.
4) Forcing Publishers to accept Dynamic Allocation by punishing them with the maximum allowed revenue drop for Bernake (40%) while inflating competitors. Notably Machiavellian that there was a known allowed revenue drop. "We're bein nice, we'll only cut you 25%"
On a slightly different topic, made me wonder how many investment firms artificially lower rates on funds to scrape a bit of profit off the top.
All of what you write is in support of the parent post suggestion "why don’t publishers stop using doubleclick and build their own?" - the larger margin Google is taking (no matter how) between advertisers and publishers, the better deal publishers can offer when telling advertisers "come to our platform directly and get the same ad placements much cheaper"..
This reads like a young adult discovering the world has become corrupt and wondering why it changed so much since their childhood when everyone's good.
You know that thing where Google tracks every action you take online, and everything you do on your phone, and everywhere you go with your phone, and every calendar detail you enter, and every contact you keep, and every dumb curiosity you think to look up when you're bored or wanting?
Advertisers like that.
It's tough to sell them on something else, and essentially impossible to replicate as is.
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.
Yes and GNI was always an attempt by the wolf to curry favor with the sheep, they act like it’s some sort of grant but it’s always been about controlling narrative.
Journalists aren’t dumb either, talk to anybody who directly got one or was involved in the process.
Google has single-handely ruined the internet, and absolutely warped our expectations around what the economics of content creation looks like online. Google earns money from that content. Why wouldn’t the content creators be entitled to a cut?
Oh please, most content online was shared freely long before google came along.
On the contrary, it's the for-profit content creators and to a much bigger extend the monetizing platforms that have latched on to the open web and are now trying to redefine it. Meanwhile, most content is still created by users like you and me who are not going to get any of the ad profits these platforms are crying about.
Oh please, what? There’s nothing wrong or malicious or un-open with running a business by selling content online. You’re deeply confusing open and free. A marketplace built on open standards is still open.
Google has been at the helm of the web for at least 15 years. “Before Google came along” was before the consolidation of the internet. Google consolidated the internet behind Search, their browser, SEO, even Amp pages (remember that dumpster fire? So open, right?), as they slowly tolled more and more of the internet, while keeping traffic flowing to their advertisers.
Content creators are entitled to a cut of the profits that Google makes from selling ads while presenting their content. I hope this law passes and every other state follows suit.
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 model, and they know they'd lose revenue if they removed themselves from search results.
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.
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.
The proposed California law is written so that it basically only applies to Google and other social media giants. You need to have 50M+ monthly users, or be owned by someone with either a market cap of $550B+ or 1B+ monthly users.
So, at least in theory, some nimble startup could come in and have a lasting advantage against the big existing platforms until they got big enough that they could handle dealing with the regulations.
I do have mixed feelings about the recent laws written like this. It feels like if it's important that we pay news publishers, that should apply to everyone.
It's trivial to remove yourself from Google search results if you have a Google account. People who don't want to do business with Google don't regard that as trivial, since Google asks for a ton of personal information during onboarding.
Why? What moral or legal principle entitles someone to compensation for linking to their website whether or not you're profiting from that?
It's a different question when there's an excerpt or machine-generated summary. In that case, copyright applies, and in most jurisdictions it may or may not be fair use depending on what is copied and how it is presented.
Aren’t you providing marketing to the newspaper? Isn’t that what these news agencies pay google billions for? There’s a whole industry (seo) designed around getting your site linked.
This looks like a money grab to me. What am I missing?
Well, yeah it is a bad idea. Because if you tax links to your content Google will just stop linking to your content. Which is exactly what they're poised to do, as per TFA.
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 effectively an extension of copyright law to expand copyright holder's rights.
Obviously all this is hyperbolic based the actual text of the law. The law doesn't directly apply any sort of link tax, and it is shamelessly targeted only at Google and Facebook (to the point that they wrote Facebook in there by name, which is kind of stupid if you ask me). But if you drill into the reasoning it hits at the foundational level on this basic logic, and it's pretty concerning if we assume then that this will be significantly extrapolated and expanded - as has been the history with all other aspects of copyright in the past.
Honestly I would rather that governments come clean and just admit that the problem they are trying to solve is actually a "social good" outcome, and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves. Trying to artificially construct that through introduction of significant new precedents in copyright law engenders huge risks of unintended consequences and potential future extrapolation and abuse of this principle.
i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossible to read an article around the ads, login prompts, and chumboxes. News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. Giving them more money to do the thing they've spent so long failing at isn't going to solve this problem.
>directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism. a link tax that gets paid out to news sites only incentivizes them to do the bare minimum amount of journalism to still qualify as a news site, and then fill up the rest of the site with SEO clickbait to maximize their clicks for the link tax.
> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable
To appease Google…
Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wallets
> NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam
You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago. I know I often find myself resorting to this model, at least until I remind myself that it no longer reflects reality.
Here are some of the headlines on the New York Times front page right now:
The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex
Ocasio-Cortez Never Steered Money to a Key Arm of Her Party. Until Now.
New Zealanders Are Crazy for This Fruit. It’s Not the Kiwi.
Unfortunately the more news-worthy stories also suffer from a severe lack of viewpoint diversity.
Audiences are already very familiar with the ideological narratives emanating from the NYT newsroom. It’s fine as flavour, but the NYT are so heavy handed with it that often the substance of the articles are distorted to fit the narrative.
Which "ideological narratives"? This is such a vague description that you could interpret it to mean anything, especially since the NYT has been getting blasted from all directions lately. Conservatives think it's left-leaning drivel, and progressives think it capitulates too much to viewpoints on the right.
One example: the NYT fired its opinion page editor for publishing an article by Tom Cotton calling to suppress the George Floyd riots with the National Guard. For context, calling in the Maryland National Guard to stop the Freddie Gray riots was one of the most popular things Larry Hogan ever did in that blue state. Cotton’s opinion was squarely in the mainstream, and by firing Bennett the NYT revealed itself to be quite far to the left.
Another example is anything touching on affirmative action. Americans oppose taking race into account in hiring to increase diversity by a 3:1 margin. It’s an extremely unpopular and out-of-the-mainstream position. But the NYT engages in such hiring practices. And when you read the NYT’s coverage of such issues, including the supreme court’s decision in SFFA, it’s clear where the paper’s bias lies.
This bias manifests in the way articles talk about events. For one thing, it’s quite obvious from the tone of the article what the author thinks about particular policies or events. An article about Biden’s declining support among minorities, for example, might be framed as a bad thing, instead of a positive development. You will also get selective use of what policies are labeled as “liberal” or “conservative.” Restricting abortion gets labeled as a “conservative” position (which it is), but affirmative action doesn’t get labeled as a “liberal position (which it is). You’ll also see a difference in when public opinion polling is disclosed. Articles on Dobbs heavily featured public opinion in favor of legalized abortion. But articles in SFFA usually didn’t mention longstanding polling opposing racial preferences.
The other subcategories on the left are “establishment liberals,” “democratic mainstays,” and “outsider left.” Those other categories include my dad, who votes Democrat but thinks CNN is “Democrat propaganda.” Then there’s the 42% of democrats who are even further to the right and watch Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-democrats-key-demo. None of those folks are saying the NYT is too far to the right.
The folks who got Bennett fired were indeed part of a very small minority of the left, which doesn’t even carry a majority within mainstream left-leaning organizations like the NYT. They’re just effective at weaponizing rhetoric to beat establishment liberals into submission.
These complaints are always funny to me, because the "viewpoint diversity" referred to is usually right-wing rhetoric which not only already has a voice in NYT, but also has several dedicated outlets that are elevated to "paper of record" sources among conservatives. What doesn't get much play is, say, PoC and lower class youth perspectives on topics like foreign affairs and economics. There a plenty of eloquent voices among that cohort (that you should have to be eloquent to be heard), but that would disrupt the manufactured consensus around what government and private enterprise do here and abroad.
If that's what you're arguing we should be hearing more of from the NYT, though, I'm all for it. Not, say, another half-baked article about "crime waves" so that the NYPD can get another billion in overtime or whatever. Or, on the hysterically liberal side, not another article about "Biden wiping out student loan debt [which he was obligated to do under already existing statute]."
Would you recognize a “PoC” viewpoint if you read it? I mean the term itself is a fake label that is basically only used by white people and elite non-whites who must navigate white spaces and institutions. My whole family is non-white immigrants, and I never even heard the term “PoC” until I went to graduate school and encountered far left white people. I think you probably have to be in the leftmost 10-15% of the political spectrum to use “PoC” unironically.
The funny thing is that, insofar as you’re talking about what the US is doing “abroad,” I’m very plugged into that political sentiment, since my home country was on the receiving end of some stupid American foreign policy choices, and my dad works in international development. I know lots of Nigerians, Palestinians, etc., but nobody would call themselves “PoC.” It’s an utterly non-sensical and reductive label.
The NYT certainly platforms self-identified “PoC,” but as far as I can tell, their viewpoints are limited to ones that flatter white liberal NYT readers. Would the NYT ever platform all the Bangladeshis I know that begrudgingly credit Trump for pulling out of Afghanistan or opposing the war in Ukraine? Would they publish my parents, who think affirmative action is a threat to Asians and want the state department to stop flying pride flags in Muslim countries? And would you even recognize that as a genuine “PoC” view if you read it?
>the term itself is a fake label that is basically only used by white people and elite non-whites who must navigate white spaces and institutions.
That's overly reductive and dismissive. An alternative POV is that language changes over time to introduce terminology that is now relevant due to some new context, shift in social dynamics, demographic changes, etc.
There are certainly people who identify as PoC in some of these contexts who who don't fit neatly into the two buckets you prescribed.
>My whole family is non-white immigrants, and I never even heard the term “PoC”
See above. Additionally, the history of race in the U.S. certainly does not impact every race identically. The phrase PoC does have a particular meaning and intent to describe a dynamic with certain groups that also have socioeconomic and other historical properties in common.
In any case, the term was likely never intended to be taken literally, hence to include your experience. But, that does not delegitimize it.
I would encourage you to consider that your family's experience as immigrants is distinctly different for many reasons that significantly impact your worldview. Not the least of these is a desire to identify with the majority in the nation to which you've voluntarily immigrated. This seems quite natural to me. But, for some, this impulse sometimes extends to a certain "fervor" to de-identify with other groups (e.g. PoCs) and their perspectives.
I've seen many of your comments along the lines of this one and it strikes me that there appears to be very little attempt to empathize with other experiences unlike yours. Further, your perspective frequently adopts the biased and somewhat punitive elements of some majority positions; for instance, concern that affirmative action discriminates against Asians in spite of the well-known data that shows everyone is far more disadvantaged by legacy and wealth.
So, it's also true that language can take on political connotations, especially in today's climate. And, that has certainly happened with this phrase. The same dynamics that animate your interpretation of affirmative action, etc. also make you disdainful of the PoC label.
> for instance, concern that affirmative action discriminates against Asians in spite of the well-known data that shows everyone is far more disadvantaged by legacy and wealth.
First, affirmative action is morally wrong. We shouldn’t inflict the concept of race on the next generation. Second, you can get rid of both affirmative action and legacy admissions.
Third, the math on that idea just doesn’t work. Eliminating affirmative action tends to almost double the percentage of Asians from 20% closer to 40%. There’s no way eliminating legacy admissions would have a similar effect. It’s simply not possible under any system of race balancing to make Asians better off than they would be in a race-blind system. More generally, when you’re a minority group that’s 6% of the population but accounts for 20% of the seats at Harvard and 40% of Silicon Valley, “equity” is simply contrary to your self interest.
>you can get rid of both affirmative action and legacy admissions.
Sure you could. But the point is about where the conversation has been directed and where the emphasis is placed, including by you.
>affirmative action is morally wrong. We shouldn’t inflict the concept of race on the next generation.
But, we should forget the impact of the legacy of race for some members of those same generations?
The problem with these kinds of arguments is that their proponents frequently recast corrective actions as "the immoral racist thing", then dismiss them as immoral and racist.
So, it begs the question of course. But, it's not exactly intellectually honest to start the clock at the place that suits one's argument.
The unfortunate truth is that race was the basis for what needs to be corrected. That wasn't a choice made by those in need of the correction.
The other elephant in the room, conspicuously missed by these kinds of arguments, is that racial discrimination continues to this day; not by law, but by biases, social networks and other artifacts from the era of overt and codified discrimination. Affirmative action also acknowledges this plain fact. The counter from those intellectually honest enough to also acknowledge it frequently runs something along the lines of "yes, but we can't fix discrimination with more discrimination". The truth is that we actually can, but it does require that people stop inciting resentment by facilely re-framing these corrections as merely more "immoral" discrimination.
And, what do we propose those on the receiving end do while society works through its ongoing issues with discrimination?
>Eliminating affirmative action tends to almost double the percentage of Asians from 20% closer to 40%
Your numbers here suspiciously align with Harvard demographics, and indeed you go on to cite that same 20% explicitly for Harvard.
And, that is stunning. You are essentially replacing every admitted student who could have taken advantage of affirmative action with Asian students.
The obvious conclusions are that:
1. Virtually every Black, Latin, indigenous and otherwise "affirmative action eligible" student at Harvard would not have been admitted, save for affirmative action.
2. Every seat taken by those students would have instead been occupied by an Asian student.
Not only is this wildly presumptuous and flat wrong, it reveals a lot about your thinking, including some "biases" (to state it euphemistically). There is a certain "they wouldn't have earned it anyway" undertone here, which also animates anti-AA arguments in the main. Poetically, these are exactly the kinds of biases I mentioned earlier, which lead to ongoing discrimination that AA seeks to address.
It also conveys a very specific POV—more accurately, narrative—that dishonestly frames affirmative action as a war between Asians and Blacks or other non-privileged groups, while de-emphasizing the effects of legacy and wealth. You have, essentially, been misdirected and enlisted as a proxy.
It's a time honored tradition to scapegoat underprivileged groups while the privileged enjoy the spoils. And, in spite of your claim that "the math doesn't work"—which you appear to have supported only with faulty assumptions—the numbers actually bear out who's really winning:
"In 2022, Harvard’s overall acceptance rate was 3.2%. The average admit rate was approximately 42% for donor-related applicants and 34% for legacies." [0]
Black and LatinX admittance stands at around 7%. So even assuming their overfitting is all due to affirmative action, this pales in comparison to donors and legacies, in both percentages and real terms (butts in seats, displacing other butts in seats).
> An alternative POV is that language changes over time to introduce terminology that is now relevant due to some new context, shift in social dynamics, demographic changes, etc.
Yes, the term was introduced due to the need in some circles to extend the white/black dichotomy of US politics to encompass Asians and Hispanics. But that label doesn’t serve the distinct interests of Asians and Hispanics.
> I would encourage you to consider that your family's experience as immigrants is distinctly different for many reasons that significantly impact your worldview.
Of course, but that’s exactly my point. The majority of people encompassed by the label “POC” are immigrants or descendants of relatively recent immigrants (excepting native Hawaiians and Tejanos and the like). But the term “POC” is based on the experiences of ADOS and indigenous Americans. It erases a salient distinction (the common experiences shared by immigrants), and elevates a superficial distinction (non-white skin).
> But, for some, this impulse sometimes extends to a certain "fervor" to de-identify with other groups (e.g. PoCs) and their perspectives.
Of course they do. Immigrants already have a pre-existing identity based on shared culture, language, and history. Why would they identify with other people with whom they have little in common, culturally or in terms of political interests? Why would they embrace “people of color” as an identity, which denotes no cultural or historical ties, but exists in mere juxtaposition to white people?
The term “POC” also obscures a fundamental conflict in economic interests between immigrants and ADOS/indigenous people. Immigrants are all basically at various stages of the same economic assimilation curve. Guatemalan Americans are poorer than Swedish Americans, but that’s because of timing of immigration; upward mobility is similar between the two. Immigrant POC thus have a strong interest in “not fixing what isn’t broken” (for them). By contrast, economic gaps between black/indigenous people and everyone else haven’t been closing over generations. They remain as big now as in 1960. Those groups this have strong economic incentives to demand fundamental changes.
That is not to say that individual Asians and Hispanics may not favor such changes for the same reason many individual white people do. But the starting point must be recognizing that different groups are distinct and have distinct interests.
I agree that they write a lot of normal headlines, like most of the ones you list.
I take issue with the last one (and others like it) because of its intentional coyness in an attempt to get you to click through. I've been seeing this more and more from them lately, and the kindest thing I can say about it is that it does not befit a newspaper like theirs.
It's disingenuous to claim those are "front page" stories. The NYT main webpage has the first pages of the different paper sections as you scroll down. The "front page", or most important news of the news site , is at the top, which is exclusively (right now) dealing with US politics, an Australian attack, the Middle East and Chinese/Indian foreign policy. Meanwhile, to get to the hangnail article you have to scroll 75-80% of the way down. Past the other news, the op-eds, the sports, all the way to the lifestyle section and right before the cooking section.
> You may be operating on a model of the New York Times from ten or more years ago
What the heck does that even mean? A decade ago, NYT wasn’t behind an paywall. But even then, are you implying that my version of NYT is a decade old, or is my “operating model” of NYT my perception of the site? Either way, what you’re saying makes zero sense. I opened it right now and it isn’t what you’re describing. Most of the headlines you posted were never on the front page. Here’s what it shows right now:
Iran Fires Over 200 Drones and Missiles at Israel in Retaliatory Strike
Biden Shrinks Trump’s Edge in Latest Times/Siena Poll
A Closer Look at a Slight Shift in the Polls
China Had a ‘Special Place’ in Modi’s Heart. Now It’s a Thorn in His Side.
In Ukraine’s West, Draft Dodgers Run, and Swim, to Avoid the War
I subscribe to the NYTs, and one thing that drives me nuts is their animated graphics which play in a loop on some articles. They aren't ads - they are artworks created for the story, but I find it really distracting to try to read text when there's some dancing cutesy image looping endlessly in my field of view. They really should add an option to let the reader opt out of that crap.
NYT mobile app is busted with ad blocking. It tries to spam refresh the ad and freezes the whole app for multiple seconds every time it tries to show one. I already pay for a subscription, why should I be forced to see ads?
Maybe if Google ignored news sites, things would improve.
Look at the Washington Post site. One good article above the fold, a right column of clickbait, and more clickbait when you scroll. Then crap "lifestyle" articles. Pathetic.
Eh really? I’m a paying subscriber to the NYT, and every now and then I browse the site without an ad blocker, it’s unbearable.
But maybe we’re grading on a curve here.
Also they have a mix of comically bad articles and really good ones. Whereas in the past there was some level of baseline journalistic integrity.
Now I frequently read articles where at least once a week I have to check if I’m accidentally reading an op-ed, because it’s so opinionated. And this is even when I happen to agree with the political slant they’ve clearly taken.
I don’t want any slant. I want factual, objective reporting, whether I like the outcome or not.
the only reason they have to appease google is because they had given up on worrying about navigation or discovery on their own platforms, and ceded that to google. which is dumb. google's not forcing them to do anything, they gave up control and responsibility to google.
uh what? the average news site is hacked together by a motley crew of non-programmer marketing interns who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world
none of this is to "appease google". it's malicious incompetence, malaise, and cynical stupidity.
>who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world
They do this because Google wants them to, so that their ranking goes up.
I opened the Google app on my phone to read the news feed, 9 out of 10 articles were unreadable under the cookie popups, floating videos I didn't even click to start playing, and other helpful offers getting in the way. It's shit, utter shit. Why don't they have "reading mode" to show only the text, I bet they are afraid of getting sued if they supported clean text like the HN app I have installed. On the laptop I always use ad blockers and don't see the whole scale of the disaster.
I've used firefox with adblock/ublock since I first learned about it 20-ish years ago. I have a vpn on my phone primarily because I can do dns adblocking. I gave up most news and social media around COVID times, and haven't watched ad supported tv in 10 years (oh god, I sound like the uni-bomber; lol) - so I forget how bad the cacophony of advertising is for normal people. That everyone who can doesn't instantly install an adblocker on their browser (I think its like ~30-50%) still blows me away...
Google rewards them by ranking them so high. In any case, Google doesnt actually give a shit about any core web anything when they’re raking in the adsense monies. These are simple distractions, they know which side of the bread is buttered.
What is unreasonable about not wanting your news organization to be ripped off for free?
What is reasonable about OpenAI’s “we learn fairly from everyone’s IP, but paying customers may not train competing models with outputs we gave them?”
Imagine you paid a teacher and they said you weren’t allowed to teach someone else what they teach you, while they are actively teaching you things that other people taught them, and they’re so new at teaching, you wind up teaching them. Seems legit
I agree; moreover, I don't even understand why there's any controversy. A set of weights for a network trained using a particular document is a derivative work.
When I attended college and got a degree in Mechanical Engineering, that didn’t make all my future design output a derivative work (legally).
I don’t earn money from AI/LLM, but I tend to think that there’s a point past which the derivative nature of a type of summarization is not obviously a derivative of that entire corpus of work. (At least not in a sense that’s meaningful/practical.)
Certainly not all of it, but if you were to cut and paste some words from one of your textbooks, maybe change a few words, and then pass it off as your own, I would call you a plagiarist or a thief.
The NYT makes a credible argument that the AIs are just cutting and pasting from their training set, sometimes lining up words or phrases from different sources. There's a bit of synthesis going on, but not as much as you might do after 10 years on the job.
Credible argument? You call baiting and entrapment credible? Those articles don't pop up on their own from chatGPT, it takes effort. You need to know the first phrase and the title to prime it. And then it only works once in a while, not every time. They even complained in the lawsuit that the cases where the model doesn't regurgitate it hallucinates articles as from them and they don't like that either.
NYT itself is full of fluff and derivative news, and suing for expired news that only have historical value now. It's just flexing their power to corner AI.
We can't copyright everything. Some things are free: letters, words, sometimes common phrases, also, ideas. An AI is entitled to learn everything at the level of ideas, even from copyrighted works. They just need to paraphrase or rewrite as Q&A the copyrighted material before training to avoid identical replication.
Copyright is already too big as it is, don't allow them to make ideas protected as well, it will have a chilling effect on us too, not just AI models.
Baiting and entrapment? Please. They used the API the way it was designed. The next thing, you'll be arguing that hot women in nice dresses are somehow "entrapping" their rapists.
If anything, their examples illustrate the kind of knowledge that can only be found in the NYT's original reporting. They focused on some events that only their newspaper covered well and the AI responded by plagiarizing the NYT's coverage, something that's part of its inherent design.
And I'm not talking about copyrighting everything. Nor is the NYT. Consider the opposite case where they have no way to force readers to pay them for their hard work. Is that the kind of world you want to live within?
I'm very happy to reward the artists and writers who make creations. I don't see anything wrong with giving them what anti-copyright people call a "monopoly." Why? Because I know that it pushes other people to create their own new knowledge for society and not skate through by simply plagiarizing.
> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault.
To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.
> make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.
Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process?
The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place.
Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.
Advertisers have wanted moving ads since the dawn of the internet, and I'd be shocked if they weren't always willing to pay more to get them. But the big selling point of Google, and one of the drivers that got them to where they are today, is they looked at that money and said "no, it isn't worth it, this will compromise the user experience". Then they went with text ads on Google search.
Over the years I assume they've changed that decision along with the general cultural rot that comes to large companies, but there is a clear precedent. Publishers didn't have to take money to make their own product worse. They could have made their product good and tried to make money that way.
Although realistically these media companies are probably going to go out of business with the current model whatever they try. The internet has made a mockery of their credibility; the future seems to be podcasters with dedicated audiences going it alone or blogs - the costs are lower and the quality is generally higher.
Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply.
I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should you be "defending" them. What I'm attempting to do here is show that they definitely, perhaps indirectly, played a significant part in the shape of the modern web. While simultaneously decrying the laziness of publishers that led them to this late stage outcome.
I mean.. did you want to discuss how things might improve, or did you just want to score points?
It was definitely not. AMP was mostly a standard for how you should build performant websites. Then you could opt into what was effectively google caching and serving your AMP-enabled webpages for you. This is good actually.
AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.
You're crafting a false narrative of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave by someone else, when that is not even remotely true. They've been cost cutting and compromising themselves way before some evil tech corporation came to them.
There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.
> AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.
That was very generous of the billion dollar corporation to do. I'm sure there was no self serving motivation behind it.
> of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave
You seem to be struggling to see this outside of a black and white narrative and are mistaking your own polemic as being diametrically opposed to my point of view.
> There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.
You also seem to be unaware of just how many small and medium sized broadcasters and publishers there are or how large this industry actually is. You are interested in narratives, I'm interested in facts. I don't think there's much more to discuss between us.
As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that:
1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high.
2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue.
3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril.
4) If governments pay news outlets, we're trading one captured entity for another. Sure, you might get less ads about singles in your area looking meet up, paywalls, and login prompts, but also might get less news critical to the government funding that news.
The people in the trenches building the product and writing the news don't want these things you mention, and we understand when we're building anti-patterns, but the bottom line demands it.
When you've driven away your reader base, any profit you made while doing so will seem minor, compared to total revenues from keeping those readers happy and around for years to come.
Of course you can also view it as a major source of income immediately, and just ignore that it's driving away your readers. With the readers dwindling, you've lost leverage, and the advertisers are able to offer you worse and worse deals on the ads, which compounds with the dwindling reader base.
Scam ads are a choice that only makes sense in isolation. The advertisers are only your customers due to your reader base. You need to keep the reader base around.
It's a balancing act, of course, and as long as the optimization function of churn and revenue is trending positively it will remain. There are dozens of data scientists working on this problem. Taboola ads are at the bottom of pages away from the main content.
You're choosing to implement all of these terrible things by continuing your employment, so you "not wanting them" is kind of moot. Find a different job if you genuinely don't agree with what you're building. I'm a firm believer that companies would stop doing this kind of crap if we, collectively as tech workers (even better as a union!), stopped implementing it.
If it’s lucrative enough for the company, they will find an apathetic contractor who will put $LOVECRAFTIAN_HORROR_JS on the site, cash their check, and move on to the next thing.
So if a company hands you a gun and tells you to shoot someone you would pull the trigger because even if you refuse someone else would do it? Nothing but excuses for profiting off morally bankrupt behavior.
And to be honest, I don't think most of these things are terrible per se, albeit mildly annoying. Also, I don't see what you're suggesting as realistic, but idealistic. You can try to unionize developers, but good luck with that because you'll just be replaced with overseas contractors. I'd rather keep my job and feed my family, thanks.
Do you call that NPR story proof of a bias worse than what happens at other institutions? Or because it's biased in the direction that doesn't align with your views?
If NPR only represents a fraction of our nation’s viewpoints, they are not living up to their namesake of national public radio. If they wanted to call themselves progressive public radio I’d take no issue.
Mostly, NPR isn't publicly funded. It gets about 1% of its funding from the federal government. Public radio stations that carry NPR shows get more, but it's only about 17% from federal, state, and local governments. Some of them are also funded by universities, some of which are public.
If donating to NPR is a tax write off, it is publicly funded. If the majority of those donors are politically biased, they will create a feedback loop where news is catered to those donating to them. This isn't wrong per se, but just what it is.
I think part of the issue is that news does not seem to equal valuable information. Subscriptions, where a person has paying followers due to expertise in his particular domain do exist though. The difference is that they apparently offer value to the followers.
The issue is value. 1$ is too high, because most of the news right now are, and I am being charitable, opinion pieces. I have an opinion too. In fact, there is no shortage of opinions on the market. The market has spoken that opinions are worth less than 1$ a year.
Now, media companies do have an opportunity now to distinguish themselves as gatekeepers ( and a source of truth ) from AI generated stuff, but I am too cynical to seriously consider it as a possible outcome.
Last time I checked if you went in front of investors and said “hey, I want to make a business where nobody wants to pay, not even a dollar a year” you would be laughed out of the room.
So. I think that is your problem. Maybe make a business where people are wanting to pay for the content? Think about how much more money you would make!!!
I agree with you completely, and there are voices within the organization advocating for that as well. Big legacy mainstream media companies move at a glacial pace and making that kind of change takes a lot of time and buy-in throughout the whole org chart.
And, somewhat counterintuitively, I think it's also important to note that sometimes what the journalists want to cover and content that people want and are willing to pay for aren't always the same thing. Additionally, sometimes what people want and are willing to pay for doesn't sit well with advertisers, so it is always a nuanced balancing act.
What is weird is people use to pay for news papers and magazines. Yes there were some ads, but people still had a leg in the game by way of paying, it kept it balanced.
The internet grew up so fast and easy payment methods lagged, and still so mostly.
I figure out for my self if I can use Apple Pay, then I buy stuff, but if I need to do more than double tap on the power button I am out.
The main problem the news industry faces is they're trying to run for-profit businesses when they should see themselves as a public service that seeks to break even or produce sustainable losses.
News should be subsidized by people who want to inform the public whether out of public-spirited motives or out of a self interested desire to influence the public debate and, indirectly, the government. That means allowing people who want to support the news outlet to donate or to purchase a print version of the outlet's reporting. If I was a millionaire, I'd probably start or purchase my own media outlet to influence public opinion. Controlling the media is probably a better ROI than directly buying politicians so I'm surprised rich people mostly seem to opt for the latter. Even those who buy media outlets, such as Bezos buying WaPo, often don't noticeably change their editorial line or move away from the "we have to be a profitable business" paradigm.
It also doesn't help that journalists are, on average, well to the left of public opinion or that colleges offer degrees in journalism which was traditionally a blue collar profession that anybody could do. Journalism schools mean journalists are unnecessarily stuck with debts they probably can't ever repay and unable to pivot out of their profession if there's a lack of people willing to pay for it.
In some states it is the law to single click cancel. In others it is not, and requires a phone call to cancel. It's not impossible to cancel, but they bank on people not wanting to call in. They'll also try to negotiate down your rate if you call in wanting to cancel.
> 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high.
Alternatives to increasing advertisements have been tried and found to work. However, these approaches may not be feasible for all publications—especially local news outlets that may not have as many resources. These approaches are to:
i) Start selling other services besides news. The New York Times—one of the most currently financially successful newspapers—has found a lot of success in its Games section. This was famously seen in their acquisition of Wordle, though this has already been popular with their Crosswords section. The company has also found success with its Recipes section. (This is not the only reason behind their financial success, but it's a significant part of their strategy.)
ii) Focus on financial news, which lets the publication frame their reports as having a financial value that arguably exceeds the subscription price. The Financial Times is also a highly profitable newspaper today, with one of the highest-priced subscription prices that can be about $500 USD a year for a standard subscription (depending on one's region). The Wall Street Journal similarly charges a high subscription price. Both are seen as important resources for well-funded companies to buy group subscriptions for. (Once more, this isn't the only reason for their success, but it's a major factor.)
iii) Focus on a specialized, niche area of reporting that other publications can't or won't cover—ideally appealing to institutions or large audiences willing to spend money. For example, several publications in Canada focus on providing detailed reports on federal politics (such as The Hill Times and iPolitics), which is useful information for their readership that fills a gap by less-frequent reports from the country's main newspapers—this lets them charge high subscription prices. The Athletic also used to be financially successful by standing out with its sports-only reporting, which led to its acquisition by The New York Times. These specialized publications can charge more, because certain audiences find these reports financially valuable.
---
However, a major drawback to thinking about news through the lens of financial value is that many important news stories don't have financial value. While an outlet can attempt to use one of these approaches to subsidize the rest of their stories, it's also costly. It's usually not feasible for many local newspapers to fund the software development of a Games section (especially as this would need to compete with all the other online alternatives for one's attention).
It's also pricey to offer competitive enough salaries to create a newsroom to compete with The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg. However, it's not impossible—there have been a few alternative publications that have found success by focusing on a niche, such as business news in a country outside of the US, or focusing on a sector such as biotech for the publication STAT.
It's a tough problem to try and fund local news. There is civic value for one's community to have a platform for providing a check against corruption by various institutions—yet in practice, oftentimes not enough for most local residents purchase subscriptions. Alternatives to support local news can include funding (such as through taxes), but that makes the outlet reliant on government funding, which is subject to change (and the perception, real or not, that the outlet is less independent from the government).
Increasing advertisements seems like a short-term solution for local news outlets trying to stay afloat, but it's hard for me to see this as a long-term solution for sufficient funding.
> It's a tough problem to try and fund local news. There is civic value for one's community to have a platform for providing a check against corruption by various institutions—yet in practice, oftentimes not enough for most local residents purchase subscriptions.
Philanthropy and donations seem to be making headway here.
Not enough to invest money and time, no. And my preferred party isn't in power, so it's not like knowing the current leadership is corrupt would change my vote - I don't vote for them anyway.
>yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
The problem with this is the problem with every scheme I have seen so far alongb these lines.It gives the government more control over what is and isn't "journalism." Either you give money to spam farms and watch dogs equally, or you wind up with cronyism.
I'm not educated enough in journalism to distinguish high quality from low quality, but as a listener/reader, some of NPR feels like good, original journalism (my ears perk up whenever I hear Eleanor Beardsley, for example); other content feels like it is just parroting the NY Times (which itself is a weird mixture of thought-provoking articles and clickbait headlines).
I guess you missed the op-ed written by a senior NPR editor recently. He admitted that NPR suppressed stories because they might help Trump and pursued poorly sourced (and ultimately false) stories because they would hurt Trump.
What more could NPR say about those slap fights (Hunter Biden, COVID-19) that wasn't already beaten to death by the credulous corporate media? Is every news outlet required to be subsumed by the right-wing noise machine's narrative?
Uri turning to Bari to air his grievances is pretty much all any one needs to know about his POV.
"But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming."
That's no slap fight, those were serious allegations and the fact that they were false is equally important.
NPR happily participated in spreading those left wing falsehoods, but was unwilling to spread the truth with equal vigor.
I agree it's a shame that Uri had to turn outside NPR to discuss this. But you know as well as I do that NPR would not have published this.
And while COVID-19 was certainly a controversial topic, it was no "slap fight" either. It was the most important issue in the nation for two years or more.
You're dismissing important issues as "slap fights" and dismissing serious discussion because you suspect someone has a different point of view. Does that tell us all we need to know about you?
What could NPR possibly add to any of those 3 food fights? In addition to the 100s of hours and 1,000s of column inches already wasted? New evidence, witnesses, analysis, pizza toppings, anything? Nope.
Was yet another rehash more important than every thing else? There are 1,000s of newsworthy topics and issues every single day. Was relitigating the precise definition of "collusion" really the most important topic? Again?
Was there any risk that any one any where wouldn't have already been fully immersed in those jello wrestling matches? (Benghazi!)
FWIW: Every side have long claimed "the media" censors their favored tickle fights. aka "Working the refs", public relations. Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent explains how that endless meta-slapfight works.
To their credit, the right-wing noise machine created their own media ecosystem. (Though it's weird they continue to say they're being ignored, when conservatives dominate every medium.) The left, greens, socialists, grannies knitting for world peace, etc should all do the same.
> Does that tell us all we need to know about you?
Gods, I certainly hope so. Firstly, that the "news" actually be "new".
> The left, greens, socialists, grannies knitting for world peace, etc should all do the same [create their own media ecosystem]
You're proving my point there. Those are all relatively fringe groups, outside the mainstream of the Democratic party and the majority of elected officials. Prominent elected Democrats can rely on "the media" to get their message out and to protect them from criticism. (Both from the far-left and from the right, as we saw from their treatment of Bernie Sanders.)
The "right wing" (meaning mainstream Republicans and elected officials), had to create their own media because the "leans left" media will not report fairly about them. Twitter banned the POTUS. The NY Times forced an editor to resign for publishing an op-ed from a sitting Senator. And NPR targeted the President, according to that senior editor.
> Though it's weird they continue to say they're being ignored, when conservatives dominate every medium.
No one claimed they're being ignored. They're being attacked. When the left-leaning media, like NPR, covers conservatives, it's usually to take their statements and actions out of context and criticize them.
> Firstly, that the "news" actually be "new".
I agree completely, but we don't see much of that these days.
What we see is the neoliberal media chanting the neoliberal chorus, trying to silence both the right and (as you pointed out), the greens, socialists, and others to their left.
Most people misunderstood the role of NYT, WaPo, and NPR. They aren't left, right, up, widdershins, liberal, conservative, whatever.
Rather, their (self-appointed) role is to defend the status quo. aka the establishment, the beltway, the village.
NYT only looks "center-right" to me because I'm way far to the left, "left wing" to you because you're conservative. But those views aren't really helpful for understanding them. Those labels don't mean anything inside the bubble. (As revealed by their evergreen appeals for "bipartisanship", "compromise", and "consensus".)
--
Not that you asked, but there's a similar disconnect between the folk understanding of politics and how politicos behave.
I've run for office. Dialing for dollars, campaigning statewide, door belling, interviews, endorsements, messaging & framing, debate prep, costumes and makeup, all of it. Very illuminating. And now I totally get why everyone in that ecosystem behaves as they do.
Everyone should run for office, do some policy work, try to get published, etc. We'd all be better off if more people had first-hand experience in the sausage factory.
You can try and guess my politics (you'd be wrong), but I can guess that you don't think journalists who agree with your politics can be biased. I can agree with NPR's politics and still admit they are biased, why can't you?
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 places like Facebook where they actively don't want you to actually follow the link. Facebook wants you to leave a like or a comment right there under the preview, then keep scrolling.
I don't think the law (from what I read of it) actually does target that though. Might as well cite it rather than refer to it in the abstract:
> The total number of the covered platform’s internet web
pages displayed or presented to California residents during the
month that link to, display, or present the eligible digital journalism
provider’s news articles, works of journalism, or other content, or
portions thereof.
Google can remove all the summaries and the law will apply just as much. In fact, from my reading of it, in other parts they are actually referring to "impressions" as the driver; that is it's explicitly the click through that they are asserting provides the value to Google, not the prevention of click through.
I get that emotionally, it's the prevention of click through that feels injurious, but it doesn't read as the spirit of this to me. I think possibly they know that if they didn't fully scope in links here Google would immediately just reduce it to raw links and this would reduce click through and it would hurt the intended beneficiaries of this more than it helps them.
From the article, the overall point seems to be on Google making significantly more money from news than the news providers, and the providers trying to find a better balance one way or another.
I think you're right on raw links also part of the target, but it's also in the context of Google providing an overview of the news and profiting from it, whether the links are clicked or not (Google's clearly covering all the spectrum of where money can be made on the pipeline, until it hits the target site)
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.
All of this still requires actual journalism to happen at some point, though. Someone needs to conduct interviews. AI isn’t going to do that any time soon.
> The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere.
This is so backwards. This is a terrible experience. Embedded summaries are great, they make everyone's life easier. If embedded summaries are killing journalism, then journalism is already dead.
Ultimately I removed the deep links that allowed you to use third-party clients to stream the videos (e.g. VLC), so now you just have to use their very poor UI.
My site does still support searching, though, which they still haven't added after... four years.
I see a parallel between the news linking case and AI training on copyrighted content (without regurgitating it back later). If AI can't use ideas from copyrighted works, then nobody can. Because anyone could be secretly using AI we have to apply the same strict standards of attribution to all human works. And that would lead to a chilling effect, any creative act takes the risk of incidental infringement.
Should copyright owners control the external discourse about their work, or own the ideas in their works? Should we upgrade AI from protected expression to protected ideas?
> If AI can't use ideas from copyrighted works, then nobody can. Because anyone could be secretly using AI we have to apply the same strict standards of attribution to all human works.
Yes, we should be applying strict standards of attribution to all works, human or otherwise.
IMO one of the biggest defects of language models currently is lack of attribution; if sources are not properly cited, there is no way to verify the veracity of what is written. Unfortunately, apart from the technical difficulty of implementing attribution, the exact combination of sources is part of a model's "secret sauce", so there is an economic incentive to not cite.
> the problem they are trying to solve is actually a "social good" outcome, and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
This generalizes to copyright and patent IP in general; we want to encourage the creation of valuable art, inventions, and other cultural artifacts, but instead of rewarding their production in a more direct manner we instead imposed a huge restriction on the behavior of all people when interacting with media or technology in order to carve out a reward for the creator. And now this law once again restricts the freedom of others to use or share information in order to carve out a reward by way of exception to those restrictions. Creating rewards by removing freedoms from the majority of people is extremely backwards.
> and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves
Having any government fund news journalism is a bad idea. In any event, you can be certain the revenue will be redistributed to fund the war machine in another country.
Surely you're speaking about your own country of residence here?
In Estonia for example (which tangentially has one of the highest press freedom rankings in the world), ERR ("Estonian Public Broadcasting") is widely considered to be one of the most trustworthy news platforms in the country. The reason for this is simple: there is no incentive to pump out journalistic sludge for clicks, or to prey on the public's collective anxieties for larger quarterly profits.
I suppose you could argue that it indirectly supports the "war machine" in Ukraine, but I don't really consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense, especially given the national security implications at home.
Few would consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense. But self-defense is not a clear term, see for example the Bush Doctrine and preemptive war. America has a historical habit of funding its future enemies, and in more current wars of simply maintaining the status quo.
Not exactly, but I'm an American citizen who has lived in Estonia for the past ~5 years (and often read Estonian language media).
One of the more unfortunate political outcomes I've noticed from the Bush era is a tendency for people to take the tragedies of US foreign policy in the Middle East and project them onto every conflict involving the US since then (this is not targeted at you).
So you end up with well-intentioned individuals who strive for peace and opposed the Iraq War (or eg Vietnam), who find themselves siding with the autocracy invading its sovereign neighbors, for the simple fact that it positions itself as a force against American hegemony and must therefore inherently be "the good guys".
Either way, I sympathize with your point more generally, and also wouldn't like to see my tax dollars spent on drone striking weddings.
Fascinating and unusual path you have taken. There are so few people in Estonia, I wasn't expecting you to actually be there.
You have an interesting point of view and given me food for thought, thank you.
Wrt to the present, I think the current (US) military actions are simply a means of moving wealth from one segment of the population to another without a need for transparency. Hence, less tax dollars should go in.
I'd prefer to regress to the time when our government needed to fund war by asking people to purchase liberty bonds.
The standout institution of British propaganda and intelligence gathering?
I can see why the British might be very happy with them and they're often intelligent and classy about the whole thing. But they aren't a counterexample of public money being used to grease wheels in the war machine.
Why? They are the most spoiled, privileged and entitled group out there. Not only did they force google, facebook, etc to give them preferential treatment in search/algorithm/etc, now they want google, facebook, etc to pay them for the 'privilege' of giving them preferential treatment. Not only do they want google/facebook to send users to their sites, they want google/facebook to pay them for that privilege. The shameless hubris.
> therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves.
No. That's for authoritarian countries like britain and china.
> huge risks of unintended consequence
But government funded news has no risks?
What we need is to break up google/facebook/etc. We need competition in the search, smartphone, social media, etc space. The fundamental problem is that two companies control so much of american mindshare.
That's an extremely narrow view. Federal copyright law is Federal jurisdiction. States have the power to make their own non-conflicting copyright laws.
People were predicting this would happen when Google caved and started paying "link tax" to Australia and Canada and other jurisdictions with similar laws. Now – to no surprise – every government (really every media conglomerate lobbying arm) around the world wants the free money and so more such laws are popping up.
Dunno about Australia but Google ‘won’ in Canada, where the government agreed to accept what Google had originally offered, and make it up to their corporate media buddies in the following budget.
It ended with a negotiation and Google agreeing to pay $100M+ annually to Canadian news organizations, so I wouldn't exactly call that a "win" for them.
>Oh, you posted this story we really didn't like. Sorry, this month's check got lost in the mail. We'll sort it out in 6-15 business days.
Businesses eventually become reliant on significant revenue streams which gives the party that provides them power over the business.
It might not even be Google doing anything nefarious, just a case of "sorry, but our business is doing poorly and we might have to shut down Google News and stop paying if this keeps up."
In Australia there were concessions where the Australian gov of the time thought that having Google negotiate an agreement only with the major outlets (Rupert Murdoch) was acceptable so they don't pay every paper, just the ones that agree with the Liberal party (a right wing party) viewpoints.
The liberal party is now out of power but the labor party has no courage to stand up to Murdoch to repeal this.
It was all very clever and basically a way to fund right wing media in Australia via big tech. Blatantly corrupt as fuck and people need to be arrested for what went on to create this law but definitely clever.
I’m not sure this addresses the parent comment specifically mentioning the first amendment. I don’t think anyone was saying that the US is unique in having free speech laws or that those laws are a free-for-all.
However, it seems to at least be a common belief that US free speech laws are often interpreted more broadly than free speech laws in several other countries. Moreover, compelled speech (as noted by the commenter) seems not unrelated here. For instance, see the somewhat recent Colorado web designer case [1].
Seems weird that if someone links to a news site, that the news site gets to double-dip advertising revenue, since it gets to advertise on its own site, and also get a cut of the advertising revenue of someone that linked to them. It will either mean everyone will want to classify themselves as news sites, or, people that link to them will no longer want to drive revenue via ads.
The issue is that most of the time the link doesnt get clicked on because the aggregators have summarized the content. facebook especially disincentivizes clicking the link.
Reminds me of this "Report: We Don’t Make Any Money If You Don’t Click The Fucking Link". The aggregators sucked a lot of the juice out from the properties themselves.
They reopened in Spain now that they can _"reach individual or group agreements with publishers"_, which makes sense if you believe that asking the publisher before summarizing their content is the right thing to do.
Although facebook/insta did refuse to be blackmailed, and many canadian news orgs are actually harmed by this sort of bullshit link taxing because their media can't be shared on facebook anymore, where a lot of older news watchers get their news
It's not healthy for news outlets to depend on being subsidized. Or, more accurately: it's not healthy for every news outlet to be subsidized by the same source, especially in this sorta roundabout way that can be pulled out from under them with a single decision by Google. If I've come to one conclusion about professional news in the last 25 years, it's that they need to control their source of revenue and not depend on being a vassal of big tech. Our ability to get quality journalism shouldn't require a FAANG company to provide the necessary resources; not distribution, not editorial, not financial.
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 categorically (still effectively a tax on Google and Facebook) and give publishers tax breaks. That would have the same effect but be way more reasonable.
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.
Google and Meta had each been funding journalism — actual journalism, not vulture capital clickbait — voluntarily, which they are now not. Google is now paying $100m, most of which goes to huge corporations. Meta pulled out altogether, slashing traffic to canadian media sites by half.
Google offered News Showcase, where they paid participating orgs for quality content curated by professional editors. They were paying $25 million a year to Canadian journalists. That program is now not available in Canada. Facebook had a similar program of the same scale that they also pulled.
I'm not playing this game. I'm not claiming that the law was or wasn't repealed; I don't know. You're the one making the claim that it was repealed. Cite a source or you're just making things up.
You saying "I'm not seeing that anywhere" assumes you made the effort to look. People aren't going to do the homework for you. I don't have anything to prove. Google it and click the first result.
> You saying "I'm not seeing that anywhere" assumes you made the effort to look.
I did, and it's not a good faith argument to claim otherwise.
> People aren't going to do the homework for you.
You're the one making the claim. It's your homework, not mine.
> I don't have anything to prove.
You made a claim, so it is in fact yours to prove.
Given your refusal to back up your claim, it's beginning to look like you are just lying.
EDIT: I am seeing that there was an adoption of an EU regulation which modified the law, not repealed it, which is pretty different from the claim you're making[1]:
> BRUSSELS, June 22 (Reuters) - Alphabet (GOOGL.O)
, opens new tab reopened Google News in Spain on Wednesday, eight years after it shut down the service because of a Spanish rule forcing the company and other news aggregators to pay publishers for using snippets of their news.
> Madrid last year transposed European Union copyright rules, revamped in 2020, into legislation, allowing media outlets to negotiate directly with the tech giant.
To be clear: Google is still required to pay publishers in Spain: the change is that the price is negotiable.
So, it's becoming clear now why you refused to link a source: because you are wrong. And since now I am making a claim, I'm linking it:
That's reverse advertising. Instead of paying Google to display links to their sites where everybody looks (Google News) they want to be paid to be where everybody looks.
I work in news technology, including with many local news organizations, both corporate and independent, including in California. Google does not support all news organizations equally, and this seems designed to gain some leverage over organizations that do get a lot from Google. Their Google News Initiative is on its surface just a training platform for publishers to learn how to use Google’s tools but they’ve done quite a bit more for some publishers. This feels like an attempt to gain the vocal support of publishers who have been blessed by Google’s beneficence, many of which are earnest non-profit organizations who might take the bait about big bad hedge funds. I don’t know how they select who to help and who to ignore and our attempts to engage with them on behalf of publishers have had mixed results.
But publishers’ collective frustration with Google is quite high. Given the implications that “it would be a shame if something happened to your nice journalism website” coupled with the appeal against the big bad hedge funds and ghost papers, it’s sort of a clever position but I’m not sure it will work.
I wonder if these media conglomerates think the same laws should apply to them. If your news article has any linked information in it, you need to pay money to the owner of that link every time your article is opened. Seems only fair.
That's also absurd that modern news sites think they are so trustworthy that they don't even bother to cite or link to the studies or subjects they're talking about. Sometimes it's a bit insane when wikipedia only requires a link to a news site to consider something verified.
They sometimes do. And even otherwise, most "news" these days is snippets and summarization of existing online content, the exact thing they are complaining about.
Eventually, of course, it will "only be fair" that we should pay a tax to speak about the news at all, to anyone. Or at least to submit what we plan to say about the news to the approval committee.
Journalism will cease to exist if everyone just reads the aggregator summaries instead of clicking the link and at least giving the news org some ad revenue. The reality is that the government has to do something if we want a free press to continue as vanishingly few are willing to pay anything. I dont think this is the best solution but Im not sure its worse than the status quo of "no one in journalism except NYT makes any money"
There's an inconvenient fact that Google prefers to ignore:
-- Frequently, the headline and snippet is all you need. "Inflation still at 3%" is often enough for a lot of readers. An awful lot of them aren't going to follow the link.
Yes, they are trying to preserve a business model that doesn't work, but that doesn't mean they have to provide free services to any and all. If Google just had a link labelled "News on Inflation" the paper would probably be happy.
"You can just use robots.txt if you don't want to be crawled" is a canard. You can just not have a website, too.
If you're a news site and you want Google to have a link like "News on Inflation", then just give your article the title "Unpacking the latest inflation data" and save the actual info for the article itself. A lot of internet publishers have already figured this out and it's why you see titles like "These 3 states have the most affordable homes" that just entice you to click on the link.
Can’t news outlets just throw up a robots.txt and then charge for access to their sites? unless they’re incapable of producing content people are willing to pay for and actually ~want~ need Google to
drive traffic…
Isn’t the issue that Google links to websites and then reduces their commercial viability by showing summaries in search pages or by having their AI present the data without letting the website get the traffic? If so, I think a link tax is justified. At that point, Google is creating value for itself by removing value from others so it seems fair to me. And we don’t need the law to be perfect - let’s just make it applicable to companies with market capitalization above 100 billion.
But more than this, the big tech companies are just too powerful and their mere existence is anti competitive. I think that issue needs to be addressed independent of media outlets specifically. For example with AI, big tech companies are in a position to put themselves first in front of customers and prevent any smaller players from competing for users and market share. Now Apple and Microsoft are forcing their AI agents onto phones and computers, and potentially violating privacy of users and using all their data for training or other purposes. We’ve seen such a long history of anti competitive practices from these companies, and rather than dealing with performative court cases that drag out for years, we need to deal with the fact that they’re too big. They need to be split up. Or maybe just get taxed more compared to everyone else.
Can't speak for what Google plans to do in the future, but currently news results in search can either be a "top stories" block at the top of the results, or regular search results. In "top stories" you get just the headline and maybe an associated picture. In regular search results you get the headline, and a fragment of the first sentence of the article.
If seeing the headline and maybe a tiny fragment of the first words is enough to remove commercial viability, there's a lot of things that do that. Physical newspapers/magazines are generally displayed in a way that provides that information, for instance.
I'm sure there are people who search, see the headline, and don't click through. But the counterargument is that other people do click through, and without the search results then the news website wouldn't have received any of that traffic.
Perhaps-ironically, it looks like a full AI-synthesis approach would be a way to get around paying the news orgs under this law. If the Google results just give a synthesized blend of news from across the web without linking to anything in particular...
My understanding is you have to ask to be in the news wheel.
Anyone can ask to be removed from the index. The internet is old enough that it has long been standard that search is opt out, when you are part of the World Wide Web.
Does that matter though? If they control the means of getting to the user for entire segments, it makes alternatives less viable. Users don’t have much choice (it’s not like there is another competing news UI element that a user can choose to occupy those parts of the screen) and there isn’t really fair competition.
I disagree, a "link tax" is the wrong choice of response, and incredibly dangerous to a free/distributed internet: Once it exists in principle its scope will not remain limited to affecting only big unsympathetic search-engine companies, it'll start affecting other sites (like, say, HN) and get abused to deter critics from pointing to the things they want to criticize.
If any source-page with a link is "summarizing" way too much about the destination... well, then there's already a mechanism for that: "Sue them for copyright infringement."
Right now things like titles and brief summaries and whatnot are clearly fair-use, but that's not guaranteed to be a defense against some future "you can't directly point at my page" law.
Agree that charging on a link is bad. I'd even argue, that if you are going to charge for linking to an article, then I'd expect no ads on that site.
But, anything beyond a link starts to open up questions for me.
Who even uses Google's AI summarize feature for articles? For me, most of the time it's been because the pop-up for it jumped in the way for me and it was an accidental click. When I have intentionally used it, it's been a pretty poor summary and misses key nuances that make the article unique compared to other publishers.
Taking a step back further, I don't know who is asking for this feature. What's the target market here?
Also, perhaps I'm wrong here but I don't think anyone would want an AI summarized version of other types of media like songs or movies.
> For example with AI, big tech companies are in a position to put themselves first in front of customers and prevent any smaller players from competing for users and market share.
I agree. But it still has not been fixed or even acknowledged broadly. And with each new successive wave of innovation (like AI), it seems they are able to simply take up all the profits that could exist, without working hard and competing fairly for it.
This sort of legislation makes no sense, shows how out of touch regulators are with tech, and does the opposite of their intent as tech companies simply don't link the content.
Private equity firms are buying up local news outfits then lobby to force google/fb to pay up. It's an extortion racket which news outlets refuse to cover for some reason.
The US is worried that if even private journalistic entities are strangled to death, then it will have to stand up a national news service like the BBC and won't be immune from the "state sponsored news" label it loves to apply to other countries.
However, Google's interest, despite being entangled with the US quite deeply, is to not spend money to save the ecosystem. Most likely, they have their own plan for this eventuality. After all, if they would be single-handedly supporting multiple news companies, why shouldn't it be its own mega-news company and keep the additional revenues?
First, Google and Facebook both put out articles explaining why the act is harmful and what steps they would take against it.
After some months, Google eventually caved and agreed to pay money to Canadian news organizations to keep the ability to link to news content in search results.
Facebook, on the other hand, started banning links to all news sites, Canadian or not. But they way they did it is very heavy-handed yet imprecise. Various "soft news" and industry-sponsored sites don't get banned, creating an artificial class divide. I don't think there's a legal requirement for Facebook to pay to display non-Canadian news, but they're banning international news anyway. When browsing the site, the shadow-banning of news for Canadian viewers creates a split-brain syndrome in big international discussion groups, where people outside of Canada can still see certain posts/comments/links but Canadians don't see them. Old posts, even from yourself, are retroactively hidden and you can't even see them, not even with a placeholder.
People in Canada, when discussing among each other and not with international peers, work around the news-sharing issues by posting screenshots of the news article or obfuscating the URL so that the text is obvious to a human viewer but not obvious to the machine.
Finally, the banning of news links on Facebook sparks continual debate in groups and among friends over big tech, power, money, journalism, and government. It splits opinion down the middle, where some people think big tech companies have too much power and the government was right to force them to pay for journalism, and other people think that linking is a fundamental freedom of speech and that we should never pay or be extorted for the act of referencing content.
Good. Hopefully other states follow. The headline might as well be, “After Decades of Freebooting Their Content, Google Threatens to Kill News Rather Than Pay Journalists for Their Work”
Google is now the modern, lazy business equivalent of a bum asking for free stuff in exchange for “exposure”
This requires some nuance, since I think it goes beyond a "tax on linking," as I have seen it described.
News is a strange product, and one that I think a lot of people in tech get wrong. The atomic unit of journalism is not an article....it's the reporting. Even deciding to write an article is an act based on the analysis of the reporting.
Further, a good headline often tells the story itself -- and that is implicitly included when we talk about links. How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link? Probably a bunch. But you still know OJ died, or the bridge in Baltimore collapsed, etc, etc. That level of reporting, the confirmation that it happened, all that stuff -- all was expensive, all required labor and other resources.
So -- from the consumer perspective, what happens? You get clickbait. The publishers have to recoup the expenses somehow, and they need you to click through to show you ads, or a paywall. "This item in your cabinet could kill you!" Or, they cover the site with ads, hoping to get as much out of the few clicks they get.
I am not saying this in support of the CJPA, nor in support of Google. Just saying this is an existential crisis that came from the simple act of aggregation.
(Disclaimer/shameless plug: I'm a former journalist building https://www.forth.news, a social-media like news feed for reading news. While we are not there yet, our goal is to be able to revshare with the reporters/newsrooms who write the stories to be able to monetize those headlines.)
If they don't think that Google is giving them a good deal they can simply opt-out of the index. But they don't want to do that, because Google is giving them value.
This is their method of side-channeling an "unfair" deal. If they actually wanted a fair negotiation they would just go to Google directly and say "we will opt out of indexing unless you pay us $X". But they think they can get more money by lobbying a law to force Google to accept a better deal.
> How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link?
Somewhat related - I have clicked a lot more on Axios articles which I know are 2-5 minute reads, compared to other long form articles where the author wanted to write a novella. Infact I look forward to reading Axios articles which I know are well written, compared to others which are of varying quality, so less inclination to click.
I grew up with actual paper newspapers, and what I recall from that era is newspaper kiosks and stands that had front pages of dozens of newspapers, plastered over every available inch of space. People would come and stand by the kiosk and read them - for free - and sometimes, some of them would purchase something, but most did not. You could learn about most news that were, well, news-worthy without paying for anything.
> How often have you read a headline, and then not clicked on the link? Probably a bunch.
How often did the news service that published that headline also break the story vs acquired it from AP or another wire service?
I pay for NYT, WSJ and local news because I want news companies to exist. But news companies have a huge anti-tech bias (because they compete for ad revenue). NYT explicitly had a "no good news on tech" policy for a while (still?). There is a missing business model for news because it's hard to monetize, and information is free. Society should figure this out, and establish its values - but trying to pretend that google search results (or Facebook posts) are the evil villain killing news instead of the free movement of information on the internet at large is naive.
Nobody is saying this is wrong. However if journalism is so valuable then the government (so really, the people) should be subsidizing it. Passing illogical laws and putting the burden on 2-3 big tech companies makes zero sense.
Google News is operating a content + link farm by copy/pasting content from other sites. Google is pretending to be legitimate but in realty they are just as trashy. If anyone else was doing it, Google would have banned them faster than you can blink.
It's true, journalism is a tough business, but that doesn't justify bending the rules in their favor.
Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
In the end, people choose to do open source knowing that they're not going to get much money out of it.
I wasn't advocating for a position -- I also think this law will have unintended negative consequences.
My point is simply that this is more than just linking. It's a full-on parasitic relationship, where Google (and Meta, and others) take the reporting that others are doing and build their own traffic off of that, while draining the people doing the work dry. News orgs are then faced with a terrible choice -- cut off the source of traffic or give it away for free. That's different than a dev deciding to open source a project.
I think the mistake here is that news orgs are trying to invent a business transaction where there isn't any. Either what Google/Meta are doing is copyright infringement in which case they have to stop or pay to license the content itself, or it's not and they're free to keep on keeping on. I would be surprised that after 30 years of public search engines we're just now deciding that it's copyright infringement. You could argue the summaries are for sure, but regular search results and the little context snippets that show what part of the article matched your query seem totally fine.
Search engines and social networks don't owe sites they link or their users link to any traffic. It would be silly to be like, "it's only copyright infringement if users don't click through the link enough."
Yes, and it gets even more fun when the source is summarizing your page, and feeding it to their AI assistant, so they stop sending you much traffic.
The business model of links + ads is going to be more in peril in the future than it is today, regardless of the regulatory environment. We see the problem all over media: If you are relying on google to give you traffic, your content better be really cheap and SEO'd to death, or be a funnel where most content is hidden, trying to drive people into subscriptions. Agglomeration in the traffic driving and ad spaces leads to them taking most of the profit unless there's agglomeration on the other end. Just like in American healthcare, more people using the same insurance companies that try to drag reimbursement rates down is met by hospital networks gobbling up practices and pharmacies, as to get market power that the insurer cannot ignore. So we'll see situations where, say, Google and the NYT have to decide whether the search traffic is worth it, and what's the right price for letting the latest AI ingest the entire contents of the Times.
It's not about moral good or bad, but about how incentive structures leave us with few viable economic models. Both software engineers and journalists will change behavior to make more money.
> Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
I do think there should be some laws around funding certain open source software that has become critical to the functioning of society -- whether or not that's paid by tax payers in general, or by the companies using that software is a different question though.
Government funded open source strikes me as something that can very much make sense, in certain cases. Some software very much operates at utility scale, and yet, doesn't have a funding model beyond the good will of volunteers. This is dangerous, and also the type of situation that the government exists to solve.
So, yes, companies probably should pay for at least some open source software, maybe indirectly through tax, maybe through some other mechanism.
You can make the likely accurate claim that democracy can't function without functional, effective independent journalism. So how much is it worth requiring so that democracy is upheld?
I downvoted you because I think you provided an overly facile explanation that focuses too much on headlines rather than the actual issue here.
A headline has always been an attempt to sell an article access to headlines and has a long history of freely accessible for this reason. Publishers WANT links to their article to use their headlines because that is how the articles are sold.
You talk about the 'atomic unit of journalism' being reporting... but that isn't really a meaningful assertion. What is meaningful is that facts are not copyrightable (which is good.) If you are selling access to facts as your product, you have to differentiate yourself on either storytelling, curation or speed.
Notably, the California law covers all links, not just those that include a summary or headline.
I don't think the crisis has anything to do with aggregation. I think the crisis has to do with how money is spent on advertising, how much of that money Google is able to extract via their monopoly, and the degree to which we've allowed capital markets to gut such a vital institution. I think the EFF report linked in the article does a much better job of breaking down the issue, even if I don't agree with every recommendation it makes or think they are sufficient.
My point is that sharing links is a double edged sword that was sort of forced on the news publishers. They've grown dependent on the traffic -- and agreed, they need a different business model -- but thats tough when anyone else can undercut you and publish for free, and then compete for that same traffic.
Also, if you think you can differentiate on curation or speed, you cannot, because those same links will appear regardless.
And yes, the advertising monopoly is a huge part of this -- but the argument has always been that the search engines need news just as much as news needs search engines. But they've set up the situation in a way that they have all the leverage.
> sharing links is a double edged sword that was sort of forced on the news publishers.
What are you talking about? "sharing links" was not forced on publishers by anyone, not even sort of. Sharable links to content are not in any way damaging, so can't be a double edged sword. Sharable links are purely beneficial and you have done zero of the work to show otherwise.
My browser, OS and a few apps at work are all trying to opt me into letting them show me news (and breaking news, news alerts etc.) at times of their choice. It feels like every other time I open edge I'm asked to opt in to news feeds on my new tab page. (Edge is required for company intranet/SSO unless you want to piss people off by "tampering with security measures".)
I'd be in favour of charging google, MS etc. enough for news that they stop doing this. If I want to read the news, I can open a tab myself.
Canada hit Meta with a similar law with the same, predictable result. It’s hard to not be cynical and thinking that the current government wants people to be less informed, as it hurts them in the polling.
To prepare for possible CJPA implications, we are beginning a short-term test for a small percentage of California users. The testing process involves removing links to California news websites, potentially covered by CJPA, to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience. Until there’s clarity on California’s regulatory environment, we’re also pausing further investments in the California news ecosystem, including new partnerships through Google News Showcase, our product and licensing program for news organizations, and planned expansions of the Google News Initiative.
You could of course say it's tit for tat, as this is also somewhat misrepresentation and misleading.
Enacting antitrust protections for a select group of companies to pursue collective action against a single player seems a tad unconstitutional and anticompetitive.
Wouldn’t publishers stand to gain more by locking down their content from third parties and creating their own shared distribution platforms (e.g. search engines, aggregators)? As it stands today, Alphabet and Meta make far more money selling actionable data to advertisers than anything else.
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.
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 $500B heavily.
> Why do you think Google and Amazon and others can create entire products that never make a profit for years and then unceremoniously shut them down or reduce their investments in them?
It seems like Google and Amazon shutting down or divesting some products would make room for a lot of competitors to step in and dominate that space.
Maybe, but a lot of the would-be companies often get starved of revenue and die before the big companies exit. Until then, the big companies are often giving things away for free, or at a loss, or bundling them in an anti-competitive way (see MS Teams). That doesn't leave much room for a startup to survive.
“The testing process involves removing links to California news websites, potentially covered by CJPA, to measure the impact of the legislation on our product experience.”
If that’s not a veiled threat, I don’t know what is. I read that as, “The testing will demonstrate how screwed your media outlets will be when we delink them.”
With the increasing shift of media companies from reporting the news to selling an ideology, they should be welcoming people linking to it and summarizing their sales pitch.
Is Brave or Firefox doing away with news? How about Hacker News? If not, I'm not worried about Google cutting off anything. Google is only illustrating why depending on them for "truth" is a thing of the past. Same for Meta.
This same scenario has played out before around the world with either Google or Facebook saying they will pull out, but every time they’re still there. Search seems to be the one service that they won’t shutter
why can't the news outlets just charge people when they arrive on the site? just paywall it and let people read the article for like 5 cents or something?
i know this has been tried and supossedly didn't work. but why not? I would gladly be willing to pay 5 cents to read an article I like but I sure as hell am not going to shell out 250$+ yearly subscription for it (just to read one article), like most news sites do these days.
Because news organizations are used to double and triple dipping (get revenue from subscriptions, from advertising, and now from incoming links), and when things didn't go their way they are using their enormous lobbying power to force it to be so.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for news outlets methods (at least in my country) but each time I read "$megacorp threatens to cut $service" it infuriates me.
Do it, close your service and ftsu, I don’t care if you can’t agree with your partners, that just means your product is not viable. It makes those companies looks like they are so important that the world can’t work without them.
Chances are no other company than Google could make a Google news competitor because they would have serious issues with media companies, only Google can do this because they feel like they are invincible.
Sorry for the rant I’m really fed up with GAFAMs acting like they are essential public services.
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.
>"These news organizations are dead men walking already"
It means we are burdening zombies to create the real news. Who is going to do it after they are gone? Only paid for state propaganda and politico. That Doesn't sound too good.
I am all for the unified newspaper membership, where you pay for a membership that pays newspapers for their articles. The problem is how much would that cost to really fund the journalists. They would obviously still need to run ads.
What search has done to news has for decades been the canary in the coalmine for what AI is doing to art now.
Because news has weaker copyright protections than original artwork ("can't copyright facts"), Google et. al. have been free this whole time to use news as a data input and pull traffic away from the original sources.
The end result is what has happened to the news industry, and we can extrapolate what will happen to commercial art if copyright protections on artworks are discovered to be similarly weak.
That's the thing though. Google doesn't cough up the article content. It just shows headlines with links to the article for people to read. It's nothing like the AIs which are actually generating the entire content from questionable source rights.
Is the real story that nobody wants to admit the majority of people don't read past the headline? Because that's a pretty stark reflection on how journalism as a field should maybe not exist then. Hah.
Nothing is AI based here, the newspaper give themselves what they want to show on Google. So of they are not okay with the content they send, they can just send an empty string instead. The newspapers are in full control here and always have been.
Except that they're not, because they know that in this modern era, people use search to find information. So if they don't want to become irrelevant, they have to play the game; they can't just robots.txt-exclude Google, they'll be tossed into the wastebin of history against other news sources that people can just find with a click. It's not real choice when the choice is "Let this company harvest your information or become obsolete."
Similarly, artists in this modern era are stuck because to be relevant, they have to show off online (where the eyeballs are) but everything they put up online can become fodder for an AI synthesizer.
It's not any different than the newspaper stalls of the past. The newspapers show their title and cover for free on the street as well to get somebody to pick them up. And same as in the past, nobody wanted to show a blank page on the street either.
Where the newspapers are struggling in isn't getting traffic but in converting this traffic to paid customers and Google isn't responsible of any of that problem.
This is just another non-sensical law that allows the dying news publishers to shakedown other successful companies. News publishers have to evolve. NYT did a wonderful turnaround, as an example.
"The news media industry is dying because of tech" is a massively successful myth perpetuated by the news media industry.
Back in the day before tech platforms there used to be 5 successful news companies and 5 failing ones. Today there are 5 successful news companies and 500 failing ones. Tech reduced the barriers to entry and made the playing field more level, giving rise to smaller publications and indie journalism. But the appetite for news consumption is still the same, so everyone can't be successful.
Lobbying and passing rent-seeking laws only helps the conglomerates on the top.
> "The news media industry is dying because of tech" is a massively successful myth perpetuated by the news media industry.
Why do you think that's a myth? The news industry was always reliant on advertising for revenue. The tech giants of the Internet era all figured out how to better target advertisements, so a huge amount of that advertising money shifted from news to tech giants (and not just tech "giants" - Craigslist basically killed classified ads, and Craigslist isn't exactly a "giant").
I don't really know if the news media industry is "dying", but of course tech was hugely instrumental in reducing the overall amount of revenue that goes to journalism.
The news industry is still getting money via ads, same as before. The only thing that has changed is the broker that is connecting them to the advertisers. Print media had its own ad ecosystem, and the online one is controlled by Google and Facebook (but of course the media companies can use whoever they want or even talk to advertisers directly). So what is the complaint exactly? That Google shouldn't take a cut? Except that the law isn't even about advertising, it's about link aggregation (which Google also happens to do, but that is completely separate from its advertising arm).
No, the news industry isn't still getting money same as before - the total ad revenue the industry is getting has significantly decreased.
Newspaper ad revenue has simply collapsed (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/28/audiences...) and it's not being replaced by digital media as digital ad revenue for news industry (as opposed to total digital ad revenue) is shrinking every year.
AFAIK, the news media is dying because it was taken over by malicious short-term focused MBAs that turned all of it into crap.
Honestly, I don't know what 5 successful companies you are talking about, but it's true that it's being replaced by lots and lots of small players that don't look anything like "big journalism".
Yes and no. There were thousands of moderately successful local papers that really don't exist anymore. They had a handful of different revenue streams (classifieds, real estate and auto sales ads) that have all been gradually eaten into by internet competition.
There is no love lost between me and Google, but then I have zero regard for "news" organizations that are attempting to strong-arm funds from Google for their failing business model.
I agree with this sentiment 100%. They've (diff news orgs and gov'ts) tried this tactic elsewhere and they have failed, but there still are folks who think if they try again, this time they will be lucky or they can find a sympathetic ear in the gov't to do the dirty work for them.
is it news orgs or governments? News orgs can't enact taxes without co-opting governments to pass laws.
But I agree these link taxes are a fundamentally broken concept where legacy media looks to strongarm funds out of others for sharing their publicly shared news.
100%. I can't think of a less empathetic beneficiary of this bill than Chatham Asset Management and the other vulture firms that are overseeing the destruction of the news business.
In capitalism, this manifests as monopolies. But other systems have their own problems with the same root cause. Soviet newspapers were ... not exactly a fun or interesting read.
I don't think most consumers of news content really think about the difference between a source, a syndicate, or an aggregator. And a significant portion likely don't know the difference. Media literacy is a significant problem, both in the US and in many parts of the world.
Google penalizes link-farms, and websites who copy content from others, but adopts a holier-than-thou attitude for itself. Not very surprising. There is no inherent "legitimacy" when Google (as the worlds largest spyware vendor) does it.
Yes, but those link-farms get de-ranked by Google (which is a good thing IMO). Google is pretending that their particular case of linking is legitimate and deserves fair-use protection.
I don't think Google is pretending. Its linking is legitimate. Also, it feels strange to draw an equivalence between Google downranking a spam website and the government charging to link to things.
There is no difference between content/link farms and what Google is doing - its copy/pasting someone else's words on a website and surrounding them with ads.
It's like these so-called "tech" companies want people to believe the internet is useless without their "assistance".
As if no internet user could ever retrieve news from its source through the internet without using an intermediary website that performs surveillance, data collection and sells ad services. (And makes more money from ads than the news source.)
"Without intermediaries, this internet is useless. Cannot find anything. Cancel my subscription!"
Yeah, right. The internet is incredibly useful. "Big Tech" is not the internet. It's just a giant leech.
Why is "Big Tech" putting the squeeze on news organisations, killing off an essential function of a democratic society. What, are we suposed to stay informed via amateur blogs, Facebook pages and YouTube channels. It cannot kill the news businesss off completely, at least not yet, because it needs news organisations to produce the bait used to lure ad targets to its interstitial websites.
In the end "Big Tech" will have to pay. The only question is how much. The "We will cut off the news" negotiating tactics exemplify the total lack of humanity of the people behind the scenes at these intermediaries. That's what happens when someone spends their entire life in front of a computer screen.
No doubt these people believe all news is untrustworthy, worthless. No wonder they do not want to pay for it. Without that news product, they would have far less traffic and far less profit. Why else would they continue to intermediate it if it is not worth anything to them.
"Big Tech" needs to get into the content business or get out of the way. It's content that www users want. They do not care about some intermediary that has nothing to offer. Using these intermediaries to get content is just a means to end.
Not surprising that we are seeing an idea such as "generative AI". Copy content from others and then generate "new" content without having to pay anyone.
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.
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.
No, they bought it in the form of Doubleclick, and its profits supported the rest of their money-losing business. If buying Doubleclick doesn't make you responsible for Doubleclick, I don't know what does.
People wouldn't tolerate the level of online ad blight we had 20 years ago, there are ad-blockers now; the reason Google isn't going buckwild with ads is because it can't.
Yes there were obnoxious ads that popped up, but we didn’t have the same degree of monopolization in platforms or walled gardens, and we didn’t have so many industries whose existence depends on online advertising. Google and Facebook’s ads may not be as obnoxious but there’s more of them (look at how many ads there are on search results page) and they’ve affected the viability of many other parts of the economy in my opinion.
> 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).
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.
"We have long said that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism."
I have long said that google takes the wrong approach to supporting lots of things; but the execs just tell me to f'off and jump into their pool filled with $100 bills.
"It’s well known that people are getting news from sources like short-form video, topical newsletters, social media, and curated podcasts, and many are avoiding the news entirely. In line with those trends, just 2% of queries on Google Search are news-related. Nevertheless, we want to continue making targeted contributions to the news ecosystem to help news publishers navigate this inflection point."
Google acknowledges they had a part to play in causing the collapse of journalism but has no solutions to offer.
People aren't consuming news, and when they do they choose the least accurate, most entertaining sources for it. Newspapers and local broadcasters are suffering because the public has lost the will or the capacity to focus. When will we start seeing white box Surgeon General warnings on Tiktok and Youtube that remind the user prolonged exposure can cause serious mental health issues? [1] Where's the DARE school-visit campaigns to remind kids that broadcast news is free over the air and their parents are chumps for paying streaming services' subscription fees?
> When will we start seeing white box Surgeon General warnings on Tiktok and Youtube that remind the user prolonged exposure can cause serious mental health issues?
We won't (or if we do they won't accomplish anything), because once you've moved to a low-trust society, which we are rapidly doing, any official statements telling you which information to consume/avoid are seen as Enemy Action and make you trust your outside sources even harder. You can find tons of Zoomers saying they get news from Tiktok specifically because it's not under the control of The Man (even though it's controlled by the Chinese government, the ultimate The Man). There are no easy fixes here.
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.