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I wish Google would finally go with the kneejerk reaction of just unlisting all these sites from Google Search and News.
by Sujan 6y ago
I wish Google would finally go with the kneejerk reaction of just unlisting all these sites from Google Search and News.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoEssentially France has said Google, being a monopoly, is not allowed to refuse to provide this service. They must do it, they must pay for it.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> France has said Google, being a monopoly, is not allowed to refuse to provide this service If it’s not providing the service, it’s no longer a monopoly. Assuming this will survive European appeal, which I don’t, one could yank all resources and cap e.g. bandwidth to Google News France. The aim isn’t to cripple the product. It’s to limit costs on a statutorily lossmaking product.
- Reventlov 6y agoWell, the decision covers the fact google search is a monopoly. Not google news. Google, being in a monopoly position in terms of search, can forces newspaper to provide their data for free, which is unfair. If google wasn't in a monopoly (for search), it wouldn't be a problem. So, yes, indeed, Google can stop providing search for the whole France.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago> Google, being in a monopoly position in terms of search, can forces newspaper to provide their data for free, which is unfair It should be able to just de-list news sources for French searchers. Again, I can’t see this surviving a non-French EU court. If it did, zeroing resources to crawling French news sites would be a reasonable response. All that said, this is a silly way to go about subsidising local news. If France wants its newspapers, subsidise them. Don’t force an American company to provide you with a service and then make them pay for it.
- Reventlov 6y ago>If France wants its newspapers, subsidise them. It's already done, let's note.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- imgabe 6y agoThe newspapers are providing their data for free to anyone who visits their website, assuming it's not behind a paywall. Google isn't forcing them to do that. If they want people to have to pay for it, make that a requirement of visiting the site.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoMany do. However, then Google punishes their search rankings for having a paywall. Forcing them to offer their data for free if they want to show up in search.
- CamperBob2 6y agoSo, they should start their own news search engine. Problem solved.
- imgabe 6y agoThen they should not be dependent on search traffic. The fact is, despite some politicians declaring it a fundamental right, the news does not provide enough value to most people for them to pay for it. There is an absolute glut of content out there, way way more than anybody wants or needs. Much of it is less than worthless, it's actually of negative value because it's designed to hijack your attention. Remove the infusion of ad money that is producing this, let it settle to the things that people are actually willing to pay for, and we'll all be better off.
- droithomme 6y agoThe newspapers should pay Google if they want to be listed.
- zajio1am 6y agoAs a search engine user i am glad for that, as websites behind paywall are useless for me. If i pay for a news site, i would go directly to it, and i would not care about hundreds of other paywalled results that i would not pay for.
- droithomme 6y ago> the fact google search is a monopoly Except it's not. I never use Google, I use DuckDuckGo. If DDG fails I try Bing. I have google and facebook domains blocked from access in my system because I don't like their tracking. Lots of other people search without Google. Google is simply not a monopoly in the search game.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoGoogle has over 90% of search market share in Europe. The statement that Google is a monopoly isn't really debatable. And the fact that you can use another search engine doesn't change the power Google has, because everyone else uses Google. So your website has to play by Google's rules if you want to be found.
- droithomme 6y ago> The statement that Google is a monopoly isn't really debatable. OK, let's not debate. We'll just agree that the statement is empirically false.
- slavak 6y agoA monopoly is not _just_ a company that controls 100% of the market. If pure monopolies were the only kind the term referred to it would be all but useless. https://bizfluent.com/about-6601606-monopoly-economics-.html https://bizfluent.com/about-6601606-monopoly-economics-.html
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Udik 6y agoSolution: keep running google news, but without the snippets. You search for news, you get a set of mute links to articles from various sources.
- neilparikh 6y agoAccording to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843579 , the court forbid that as well.
- inetsee 6y agoThat's what Google already did. The results include the article titles, but no longer include the snippets that expanded on the information in the title.
- panzagl 6y agoThat was specifically denied by the ruling.
- georgyo 6y agoThe ruling states they _must_ index, provide snippets, and pay. Google did remove the snippets, which hurt the news sites traffic, such is mostly Google referrals. This ruling makes it so they must index and pay.
- Talanes 6y agoEveryone keeps replying to tell you they were forbidden from doing that, but they weren't. They ran with that option PLUS sending out contracts to get the newspapers to license the photos and snippet content for free. It's the second part that the courts objected to.
- zepto 6y agoI don’t see that anywhere. It seems that they are free to completely stop showing news sites.
- mc32 6y agoI agree, pull the plug on them. Let’s see what they say then. I can’t imagine them forcing Google to list them but also pay them. Let’s see how organic traffic works for them.
- eli 6y agoBad for users in the meantime.
- qnsi 6y agonot really Google's fault but publisher's.
- CamperBob2 6y agoMaybe the users will remember that in the next election.
- trekrich 6y agoThey should, and when they come back asking for it all to be undone they should say no. Let them swim for a little bit so france does not try this again. This was tried in spain, and quickly reversed.
- Marsymars 6y ago> This was tried in spain, and quickly reversed. No it wasn't, Google News is still not available in Spain.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoSo what you're saying is Google should have more power and authority than actual nations.
- renewiltord 6y agoThere's no total order of power and authority. I want the US government to not have the power and authority to set up and run a church but I want that power and authority, and I'm pretty sure I want Google to have that power and authority. So yeah, I want Google to be able to say "I don't want to list papers that won't do this for free", yes.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago> I want Google to be able to say "I don't want to list papers that won't do this for free" That's up to the french people to decide. Google negotiating with nations as if it was a trade agreement between equals would mean we're living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
- renewiltord 6y agoThat's the dream. When governments cannot simply impose their will on me at a whim. The fault isn't that Google can negotiate as an equal. The fault is that I can't negotiate as an equal when I want to marry a man or abort a foetus or drug myself. And I'd rather erode the power of the government than of myself every single time. And I'm pretty sure the French people don't get to decide what I want. Only I get to decide that.
- fab13n 6y agothat's exactly what they did last year when the law came into force. Then newspapers could fill a form begging Google to accept their content for free, which most of them did. I don't know what this post refers to, haven't had time to check yet.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoEssentially France has now said refusing to list sites unless they grant the right to do it for free is illegal. Because the only reason Google has the power to demand free access is their monopoly. They have demanded Google negotiate a fair price for the ability to display the news snippets.
- jstanley 6y agoGiven that the "fair price" is 0, that shouldn't make a lot of difference,
- wolco 6y agoThey should offer a revenue share for all ads on the newspaper pages. And force them to use adsense.
- droithomme 6y agoI disagree. I think a fair price is below zero. The news sites should pay Google if they want their sites listed.
- zajio1am 6y ago> Because the only reason Google has the power to demand free access is their monopoly. That is not really obvious Consired situation where Google is not a monopoly and there is active market with search engines and each search engine needs to establish contract with each news site. Now consider case where one search engine that already has contracts with half of all news sites is negotiating a contract with a news site that already has contracts with half search engines. Who gains more from such contract? I would guess that the news site, becase such contract would directly lead to higher ad revenue, while for search engine it would lead to better search results that may or may not lead to higher ad revenue, but the effect would be most likely sublinear. Therefore, marginal utility of contract is higher for news site and it is possible that in negotiation search engine could got payments from it.
- blondin 6y agonot sure i follow... this is about showing a snippet of a news article at the top of search result right? similar to pulling youtube videos, wikipedia articles, or stackoverflow answers and showing them at the top of your search result. i mean, sometimes, i don't even leave the search result page because i get my answer right there. heck, i don't even leave my address bar nowadays when using chrome! news publications seems to be struggling and if google needs to support them then why not give them a little of the ads money?
- vntok 6y agoBut Google doesn't need to support them.
- blendergeek 6y agoWell, there are no ads in Google News. So, Google just will share their other revenue with news agencies?
- dopidop 6y agoGoogle news main and only feature is to crawl existing news website. Those news agency are actually putting natural language together and conducting journalist work. Until google can auto-generate NYT/Guardian/Le monde/El pays... The leech is google; not the news.
- badrabbit 6y agoWhy? Google derives value from news site's content. Advertisers pay google for clicks,if google treated news sites the same as any other site there would be no problem but google is adding additional value to their own product at the expense of news sites without additonal compensation. You seem to think it is a priviledge to be listed on google, I disagree, it is a priviledge for google to be allowed to conduct business, one that comes with a long list of conditions including fair business practice,paying taxes, hiring fairly,etc...
- izacus 6y ago> Why? Google derives value from news site's content. Advertisers pay google for clicks,if google treated news sites the same as any other site there would be no problem but google is adding additional value to their own product at the expense of news sites without additonal compensation. Hmm, sorry, this makes no sense - in this context the only possible advertisers are the news companies themselves (this is how you add your Ad to Google) and they want to be paid for this listing, not the other way around. Can you explain more how does Google derive value from these news articles?
- dilyevsky 6y agoYou and me googling for news sites and presumably clicking on ads (which I’m not really sure are even shown for news queries). In reality I think news sites benefit a lot more from being featured in that feed but i guess we’ll find out soon enough if that’s true
- 6y ago
- pmart123 6y agoI agree. Google has gotten a lot worse for long tail searches over the last year. My feeling is they felt pressured by major news outlets in the US to only display “trusted” sources. Now I only get company links or nytimes versus an expert blog on the subject matter.