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.
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.