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The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it sh

The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it should be the other way around. Sadly, the traditional media has a massive conflict of interest here, so the issue passed at least in my part of EU with little to no ado. But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will surely meet the propeller. No amount of regulation can change fundamental economic facts. Once Google News starts going black around EU, and the search engine traffic & revenue disappearing from the publishers, I am sure they will be soon very eager to license their content at zero cost, or less.

reaperducer 8y ago
Is Google News really that big a deal for publishers? Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem? I don't see anything magic about Google News that isn't done better (Apple News), or more thoroughly (Twitter) elsewhere.
- wmf 8y ago
  Presumably the publishers intend to strong-arm all those sources into paying them.
- ma2rten 8y ago
  They are referring to news snippets that show up in Google Search (not the Google News app on your phone). Those are one of the most significant sources of traffic for publishers.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Even for a web search, Google News doesn't show snippets at all anymore, just headlines and thumbnails. (This is in the "Top Stories" widget and on the "News" tab.) It looks like the snippet is still there for generic web results, but that's further down the page for a news search and probably not a big driver of traffic.
- Blackthorn 8y ago
  This was addressed in the article. The shares of other sources are down, and the shares of Google sources are steady or rising.
- vesinisa 8y ago
  Far more important is the search traffic I'd guess, but it will obviously go dark in concert with Google News.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Apple News is awful. Worse, you can't uninstall it on MacOS. Since when is it OK for machines built for professionals like the MacBook Pro to come with crapware, let alone uninstallable crapware?
- ucaetano 8y ago
  > Is Google News really that big a deal for publishers? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-spains-google-tax-has-been-a-disaster-for-publishers/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-... https://www.aeepp.com/pdf/InformeNera.pdf https://www.aeepp.com/pdf/InformeNera.pdf The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop for smaller publications. Those numbers are slightly smaller than a GigaOm analysis from last year, which found traffic drop-offs of 10 to 15 percent.
- thirdsun 8y ago
  > Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem? You should read up on the german Leistungsschutzrecht-Saga from a few years back. The media industry was lobbying for years to get Google to pay for showing links and snippets to their content in Google News. When the legislation finally passed Google offered publishers the option to delist them from Google News (not search) or keep showing their results while waiving their right to get paid. They all chose the latter thereby rendering the very same legislation they have been pushing for so long useless. Absolutely absurd.
martinlaz 8y ago
Or maybe people will start going directly to their favorite news outlets? That's very low effort. At least, I can see myself doing that...
IanCal 8y ago
The problem though is not that aggregators link to the news articles, but the concern of them containing so much And if Google are making a profit by bringing eyeballs to their site using other people's content, shouldn't it be up to the people who created that content to choose how to negotiate that? They're free to let Google take the content for free / pay Google to take the content if they want, unless there's something in article 11 that I've missed.
- devman0 8y ago
  They already have that freedom. They can post a robots.txt that tells Google to not index certain content.
  - troygoode 8y ago
    But then how would they eat their cake and have it, too?
  - IanCal 8y ago
    I don't understand. If they already have the ability and protection for all of this, what difference does the legislation make? If not, how do they already have this freedom?
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      They have the freedom to tell Google to go away, but they don’t have the freedom to extract money from Google. They needed the legislature for that.
      - IanCal 8y ago
        What do you mean by "freedom to extract money"? Charge and negotiate? If they don't have the right to negotiate fees for commercial use of their content, that sounds like quite a large missing part that needed adding. Can you explicitly put down a case of something they couldn't do, but now can, and why you think that's a concern? Because I honestly just don't understand the point that people are trying to make with this.
fjsolwmv 8y ago
It's not about paying for traffic or links, it's about paying for the content Google copies and republishes.
Silfen 8y ago
This is essentially the argument laid out in stratechery: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-european-union-versus-the-internet/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-european-union-versus-the-i... The link tax seems like wishful thinking on the part of the publishers - an attempt to legislate the market dynamics of yesteryear.
r00fus 8y ago
Or maybe not? I mean Bing, et. al. would kill to dominate one area of search, and MS has burned billions so far with middling success. What's a few more $B if you can get dominance in the EU? Trading one monopoly for another may be exactly what the TradMed has been wanting - with the carrot that they'll switch back if "the price is right".
dahdum 8y ago
This situation reminds me of Google Shopping...used to be completely free to post products and get them included in the search results as "snippets". Now it's 100% paid, and expensive. Google News may go dark, but I wonder if they won't come up with some nice new ad format for publishers to feed their stories into, for a market based price, of course.
- ariwilson 8y ago
  FWIW as a consumer Google Shopping is much, much better than it used to be.
wpietri 8y ago
I agree, and also think it's very easily worked around in a way that is detrimental to publishers. If I were in the shoes of a Google News product manager, my take would be, "Fine, I won't show your snippets then." I'd show a summary and then headline links to the various news sources. (Or if that's too much for the law, just links with the title of the paper.) The number of news stories is small enough that the bulk of summaries could be quickly written by humans. But I suspect Google has enough ML magic that they can easily generate adequate summaries for most articles, with a small team of humans that reviews and improves prominent ones. This would be just as good from the consumer perspective, and it's another opportunity for Google to build up a data-driven moat. But from the newspaper perspective, they lose out: anything that makes their voice unique or distinctive will get squeezed out. It would further commodify news, which is the last thing newspapers want.
justinph 8y ago
Google is very much more than an aggregator. They've invented a proprietary standard (AMP) which they then strong-arm publishers to use, and is only beneficial to publishers when hosted on google's platform. They're forcing publishers to give up their content in order to play the game. I hope the US FTC+DOJ is paying attention.
candiodari 8y ago
> No amount of regulation can change fundamental economic facts. You know, you should take a course in law. Usually they're given by people with relatively high positions in the justice system. And then, not in the first class, but say the 10th lesson, ask the professor. "Do tell, prof, do you think lawmakers actually do a good job ?" And I would expect you then get a 45 minute rant about just how inconsistent, unrealistic, constantly violating basic legal principles, ... lawmakers are. Including several horror stories. One example given was equality between men and women. Now don't get me wrong, I'm 100% in favor of equality. In marriage, this is pretty new. Unfortunately there's entire books full of laws about how to apply the previous non-equal rules to children, houses, debts, cars, fines, ... and so on and so forth. And the marriage equality law, surely it tells judges how all the other applications of marriage and divorce law now applies, right ? Heh. No it doesn't. So we get decades of inconsistent, per-state, ... judgements that get criticized for being, well inconsistent, cruel, corrupt, ... by those very same lawmakers. Fun, isn't it ?

reaperducer 8y ago

Is Google News really that big a deal for publishers? Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem? I don't see anything magic about Google News that isn't done better (Apple News), or more thoroughly (Twitter) elsewhere.

wmf 8y ago
Presumably the publishers intend to strong-arm all those sources into paying them.
ma2rten 8y ago
They are referring to news snippets that show up in Google Search (not the Google News app on your phone). Those are one of the most significant sources of traffic for publishers.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Even for a web search, Google News doesn't show snippets at all anymore, just headlines and thumbnails. (This is in the "Top Stories" widget and on the "News" tab.) It looks like the snippet is still there for generic web results, but that's further down the page for a news search and probably not a big driver of traffic.
Blackthorn 8y ago
This was addressed in the article. The shares of other sources are down, and the shares of Google sources are steady or rising.
vesinisa 8y ago
Far more important is the search traffic I'd guess, but it will obviously go dark in concert with Google News.
lern_too_spel 8y ago
Apple News is awful. Worse, you can't uninstall it on MacOS. Since when is it OK for machines built for professionals like the MacBook Pro to come with crapware, let alone uninstallable crapware?
ucaetano 8y ago
> Is Google News really that big a deal for publishers? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-spains-google-tax-has-been-a-disaster-for-publishers/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-... https://www.aeepp.com/pdf/InformeNera.pdf https://www.aeepp.com/pdf/InformeNera.pdf The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop for smaller publications. Those numbers are slightly smaller than a GigaOm analysis from last year, which found traffic drop-offs of 10 to 15 percent.
thirdsun 8y ago
> Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem? You should read up on the german Leistungsschutzrecht-Saga from a few years back. The media industry was lobbying for years to get Google to pay for showing links and snippets to their content in Google News. When the legislation finally passed Google offered publishers the option to delist them from Google News (not search) or keep showing their results while waiving their right to get paid. They all chose the latter thereby rendering the very same legislation they have been pushing for so long useless. Absolutely absurd.

martinlaz 8y ago

Or maybe people will start going directly to their favorite news outlets? That's very low effort. At least, I can see myself doing that...

IanCal 8y ago

The problem though is not that aggregators link to the news articles, but the concern of them containing so much And if Google are making a profit by bringing eyeballs to their site using other people's content, shouldn't it be up to the people who created that content to choose how to negotiate that? They're free to let Google take the content for free / pay Google to take the content if they want, unless there's something in article 11 that I've missed.

devman0 8y ago
They already have that freedom. They can post a robots.txt that tells Google to not index certain content.
- troygoode 8y ago
  But then how would they eat their cake and have it, too?
- IanCal 8y ago
  I don't understand. If they already have the ability and protection for all of this, what difference does the legislation make? If not, how do they already have this freedom?
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    They have the freedom to tell Google to go away, but they don’t have the freedom to extract money from Google. They needed the legislature for that.
    - IanCal 8y ago
      What do you mean by "freedom to extract money"? Charge and negotiate? If they don't have the right to negotiate fees for commercial use of their content, that sounds like quite a large missing part that needed adding. Can you explicitly put down a case of something they couldn't do, but now can, and why you think that's a concern? Because I honestly just don't understand the point that people are trying to make with this.

fjsolwmv 8y ago

It's not about paying for traffic or links, it's about paying for the content Google copies and republishes.

Silfen 8y ago

This is essentially the argument laid out in stratechery: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-european-union-versus-the-internet/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-european-union-versus-the-i... The link tax seems like wishful thinking on the part of the publishers - an attempt to legislate the market dynamics of yesteryear.

r00fus 8y ago

Or maybe not? I mean Bing, et. al. would kill to dominate one area of search, and MS has burned billions so far with middling success. What's a few more $B if you can get dominance in the EU? Trading one monopoly for another may be exactly what the TradMed has been wanting - with the carrot that they'll switch back if "the price is right".

dahdum 8y ago

This situation reminds me of Google Shopping...used to be completely free to post products and get them included in the search results as "snippets". Now it's 100% paid, and expensive. Google News may go dark, but I wonder if they won't come up with some nice new ad format for publishers to feed their stories into, for a market based price, of course.

ariwilson 8y ago
FWIW as a consumer Google Shopping is much, much better than it used to be.

wpietri 8y ago

I agree, and also think it's very easily worked around in a way that is detrimental to publishers. If I were in the shoes of a Google News product manager, my take would be, "Fine, I won't show your snippets then." I'd show a summary and then headline links to the various news sources. (Or if that's too much for the law, just links with the title of the paper.) The number of news stories is small enough that the bulk of summaries could be quickly written by humans. But I suspect Google has enough ML magic that they can easily generate adequate summaries for most articles, with a small team of humans that reviews and improves prominent ones. This would be just as good from the consumer perspective, and it's another opportunity for Google to build up a data-driven moat. But from the newspaper perspective, they lose out: anything that makes their voice unique or distinctive will get squeezed out. It would further commodify news, which is the last thing newspapers want.

justinph 8y ago

Google is very much more than an aggregator. They've invented a proprietary standard (AMP) which they then strong-arm publishers to use, and is only beneficial to publishers when hosted on google's platform. They're forcing publishers to give up their content in order to play the game. I hope the US FTC+DOJ is paying attention.

candiodari 8y ago

> No amount of regulation can change fundamental economic facts. You know, you should take a course in law. Usually they're given by people with relatively high positions in the justice system. And then, not in the first class, but say the 10th lesson, ask the professor. "Do tell, prof, do you think lawmakers actually do a good job ?" And I would expect you then get a 45 minute rant about just how inconsistent, unrealistic, constantly violating basic legal principles, ... lawmakers are. Including several horror stories. One example given was equality between men and women. Now don't get me wrong, I'm 100% in favor of equality. In marriage, this is pretty new. Unfortunately there's entire books full of laws about how to apply the previous non-equal rules to children, houses, debts, cars, fines, ... and so on and so forth. And the marriage equality law, surely it tells judges how all the other applications of marriage and divorce law now applies, right ? Heh. No it doesn't. So we get decades of inconsistent, per-state, ... judgements that get criticized for being, well inconsistent, cruel, corrupt, ... by those very same lawmakers. Fun, isn't it ?