8 ms·

The commenter you are quoting has not realized there are two problematic articles (11. and 13.) and that the "memes" story is for article 13 not 11. The entire

by sputr 8y ago

The commenter you are quoting has not realized there are two problematic articles (11. and 13.) and that the "memes" story is for article 13 not 11. The entire point of art. 11 is to transfer money from Google News (and other aggregators, like Facebook) to publishers. This also covers search.

IdiocyInAction 8y ago
Why whould Google not just delist problematic sites like they did in Germany, as they tried to implement something similar there AFAIK?
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  The last time I read about these regulations, it sounded like they would explicitly forbid this sort of arrangement between publishers and aggregators (i.e., news sites aren't allowed to agree to those terms). I don't have time to check right now, but that may be the case.
  - merb 8y ago
    > it sounded like they would explicitly forbid this sort of arrangement between publishers and aggregators and than, should they force google to pay instead of cutting these publishers off? in no way would that be legal. you can't force somebody to pay something, by forcing them to obey.
    - paulddraper 8y ago
      Yes, you'd like to think it's a free market.
      - merb 8y ago
        well google in the end can just shutdown google news.
        geezerjay 8y ago
        > well google in the end can just shutdown google news. That's the expected (and fair) outcome. To be fair, why should a multinational be entitled to profit from unauthirized access and distribution of third-party content while the content creators are left with the bill of creating it?
        AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        News organizations provide a service (news reporting). News aggregators provide a service (news aggregation). Why shouldn't they both get paid? Why should news organizations be entitled to profit from unauthorized access and distribution of third-party content while the creators are left with the bill of creating it? Shouldn't they be paying the celebrities they gossip about for doing all the "noteworthy" things they do and giving them something to drive readership with? The obvious flaw is that it's a symbiotic relationship. News organizations want traffic from Google in the way that celebrities and companies and politicians want news coverage (in the "no such thing as bad press" sense). They see Google's market cap and think they're making all this money, but the money isn't from news aggregation. That's peanuts. And if you're making a dime and they're making a nickel and you demand a dollar more, you don't get a dollar more, you get a dime less.
        geezerjay 8y ago
        > News organizations provide a service (news reporting). News aggregators provide a service (news aggregation). Why shouldn't they both get paid? That's a good question, and it seems to me that's the whole point of this legislation. Currently there is a mega-multinational company which posts record profits for services that consist of scraping and unauthorized distribution of third-party content, and in a manner that even eliminates any traffic from the content creator's site. So in the current state of affairs only the scraper gets paid, and the content creators are left with the bill. How is that fair? > Why should news organizations be entitled to profit from unauthorized access and distribution of third-party content while the creators are left with the bill of creating it? For some reason you've invented this silly idea that researching and developing a newspiece is, somehow, the same as scraping websites. I'm sure that we can agree that journalism and web scraping have nothing in common, just like xeroxing a book is not the same thing as writing a novel.
- sputr 8y ago
  We've been asking the proponents that for months. Google got a free license in Germany while Yahoo did not. Even if they ban the free license (which is a whole nother set of even bigger problems) Google can just not list them at all. It's not like they care about Google News all that much.
  - simias 8y ago
    I agree that this is probably going to backfire spectacularly but if we give the proponents the benefit of the doubt it could be argued that while the big G might not care about Google News, users may. If these news aggregator shutdown they will look for alternatives which might create an opportunity for people to develop news aggregator that share the revenue more fairly with the newspapers. I doubt this is going to happen but I suppose it might sound right for people who are not deeply familiar with the way the internet works.
    - Eridrus 8y ago
      Has this happened in Spain? They've already done this experiment on a smaller scale.
      - sputr 8y ago
        Google simply shutdown it's operation there.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > If these news aggregator shutdown they will look for alternatives which might create an opportunity for people to develop news aggregator that share the revenue more fairly with the newspapers. The problem is, what revenue? News aggregation is not a huge profit center to begin with. Then you take that already-small amount of money and split it between thousands of independent news organizations, each of which requires its own transaction costs, and the transaction costs sink the whole enterprise.
      - ivanhoe 8y ago
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> The entire point of art. 11 is to transfer money from Google News (and other aggregators, like Facebook) to publishers. This also covers search. Honestly, it doesn't seem a bad thing to me. But lat's see how Google plays it out.
- tomp 8y ago
  It's "not bad" in the same way as communism is "not bad" - i.e. in theory, but it doesn't actually exist in practice.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    Oh, some would say that communism is already despicable in theory alone.
- dnautics 8y ago
  You don't think this will eventually come to screw the little guy?
  - vkou 8y ago
    Who is the little guy, and why are we optimizing for him, instead of making the world better for everyone? I mean, I think the link tax is backwards, but a vague emotional appeal to the health of... a mom and pop internet news site...(?) is not the argument I'd use.
    - Natanael_L 8y ago
      The little guy is duckduckgo, small forums and blogs. You think it's fine to erase them from the web if they try to comment on the news?
    - syn0byte 8y ago
      Optimize for the little guy so there can be growth. "Better for everyone" is stasis because "everyone" includes all the people that already have disproportional slices of pie.
Tharkun 8y ago
Next thing you'll have to pay publishers because you read their RSS feed in a self hosted aggregator.
krn 8y ago
> The entire point of art. 11 is to transfer money from Google News (and other aggregators, like Facebook) to publishers. The latest version of Google News has already solved this: it only shows the title and the image, not a single sentence from the article itself, – which was the main concern in Spain and Germany when the relevant laws were introduced. Facebook and Twitter shouldn't face any issues as well, because they only display the value of the og:description meta tag, set by the publishers themselves.
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
  Sadly I still can't access Google News (in the normal way) from Spain though. The notice that it's closed due to the law is still there.
  - Uberphallus 8y ago
    This is what you get if you try to access Google News from Spain, for those curious. https://support.google.com/news/answer/6140047?hl=es https://support.google.com/news/answer/6140047?hl=es
- sputr 8y ago
  Only the URL is not covered under art. 11, everything else is.
  - krn 8y ago
    If a publisher implements the Open Graph protocol[1], it explicitly makes the meta data of the article available to others. [1] http://ogp.me/ http://ogp.me/

by sputr 8y ago

IdiocyInAction 8y ago

Why whould Google not just delist problematic sites like they did in Germany, as they tried to implement something similar there AFAIK?

throwawayjava 8y ago
The last time I read about these regulations, it sounded like they would explicitly forbid this sort of arrangement between publishers and aggregators (i.e., news sites aren't allowed to agree to those terms). I don't have time to check right now, but that may be the case.
- merb 8y ago
  > it sounded like they would explicitly forbid this sort of arrangement between publishers and aggregators and than, should they force google to pay instead of cutting these publishers off? in no way would that be legal. you can't force somebody to pay something, by forcing them to obey.
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    Yes, you'd like to think it's a free market.
    - merb 8y ago
      well google in the end can just shutdown google news.
      - geezerjay 8y ago
        > well google in the end can just shutdown google news. That's the expected (and fair) outcome. To be fair, why should a multinational be entitled to profit from unauthirized access and distribution of third-party content while the content creators are left with the bill of creating it?
        AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        News organizations provide a service (news reporting). News aggregators provide a service (news aggregation). Why shouldn't they both get paid? Why should news organizations be entitled to profit from unauthorized access and distribution of third-party content while the creators are left with the bill of creating it? Shouldn't they be paying the celebrities they gossip about for doing all the "noteworthy" things they do and giving them something to drive readership with? The obvious flaw is that it's a symbiotic relationship. News organizations want traffic from Google in the way that celebrities and companies and politicians want news coverage (in the "no such thing as bad press" sense). They see Google's market cap and think they're making all this money, but the money isn't from news aggregation. That's peanuts. And if you're making a dime and they're making a nickel and you demand a dollar more, you don't get a dollar more, you get a dime less.
        geezerjay 8y ago
        > News organizations provide a service (news reporting). News aggregators provide a service (news aggregation). Why shouldn't they both get paid? That's a good question, and it seems to me that's the whole point of this legislation. Currently there is a mega-multinational company which posts record profits for services that consist of scraping and unauthorized distribution of third-party content, and in a manner that even eliminates any traffic from the content creator's site. So in the current state of affairs only the scraper gets paid, and the content creators are left with the bill. How is that fair? > Why should news organizations be entitled to profit from unauthorized access and distribution of third-party content while the creators are left with the bill of creating it? For some reason you've invented this silly idea that researching and developing a newspiece is, somehow, the same as scraping websites. I'm sure that we can agree that journalism and web scraping have nothing in common, just like xeroxing a book is not the same thing as writing a novel.
sputr 8y ago
We've been asking the proponents that for months. Google got a free license in Germany while Yahoo did not. Even if they ban the free license (which is a whole nother set of even bigger problems) Google can just not list them at all. It's not like they care about Google News all that much.
- simias 8y ago
  I agree that this is probably going to backfire spectacularly but if we give the proponents the benefit of the doubt it could be argued that while the big G might not care about Google News, users may. If these news aggregator shutdown they will look for alternatives which might create an opportunity for people to develop news aggregator that share the revenue more fairly with the newspapers. I doubt this is going to happen but I suppose it might sound right for people who are not deeply familiar with the way the internet works.
  - Eridrus 8y ago
    Has this happened in Spain? They've already done this experiment on a smaller scale.
    - sputr 8y ago
      Google simply shutdown it's operation there.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > If these news aggregator shutdown they will look for alternatives which might create an opportunity for people to develop news aggregator that share the revenue more fairly with the newspapers. The problem is, what revenue? News aggregation is not a huge profit center to begin with. Then you take that already-small amount of money and split it between thousands of independent news organizations, each of which requires its own transaction costs, and the transaction costs sink the whole enterprise.
    - ivanhoe 8y ago

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

> The entire point of art. 11 is to transfer money from Google News (and other aggregators, like Facebook) to publishers. This also covers search. Honestly, it doesn't seem a bad thing to me. But lat's see how Google plays it out.

tomp 8y ago
It's "not bad" in the same way as communism is "not bad" - i.e. in theory, but it doesn't actually exist in practice.
- kazinator 8y ago
  Oh, some would say that communism is already despicable in theory alone.
dnautics 8y ago
You don't think this will eventually come to screw the little guy?
- vkou 8y ago
  Who is the little guy, and why are we optimizing for him, instead of making the world better for everyone? I mean, I think the link tax is backwards, but a vague emotional appeal to the health of... a mom and pop internet news site...(?) is not the argument I'd use.
  - Natanael_L 8y ago
    The little guy is duckduckgo, small forums and blogs. You think it's fine to erase them from the web if they try to comment on the news?
  - syn0byte 8y ago
    Optimize for the little guy so there can be growth. "Better for everyone" is stasis because "everyone" includes all the people that already have disproportional slices of pie.

Tharkun 8y ago

Next thing you'll have to pay publishers because you read their RSS feed in a self hosted aggregator.

krn 8y ago

> The entire point of art. 11 is to transfer money from Google News (and other aggregators, like Facebook) to publishers. The latest version of Google News has already solved this: it only shows the title and the image, not a single sentence from the article itself, – which was the main concern in Spain and Germany when the relevant laws were introduced. Facebook and Twitter shouldn't face any issues as well, because they only display the value of the og:description meta tag, set by the publishers themselves.

Al-Khwarizmi 8y ago
Sadly I still can't access Google News (in the normal way) from Spain though. The notice that it's closed due to the law is still there.
- Uberphallus 8y ago
  This is what you get if you try to access Google News from Spain, for those curious. https://support.google.com/news/answer/6140047?hl=es https://support.google.com/news/answer/6140047?hl=es
sputr 8y ago
Only the URL is not covered under art. 11, everything else is.
- krn 8y ago
  If a publisher implements the Open Graph protocol[1], it explicitly makes the meta data of the article available to others. [1] http://ogp.me/ http://ogp.me/