6 ms·

So this is just a very roundabout way of subsidizing Australian news media without having to call it that.

by sesutton 6y ago

eastendguy 6y ago
Subsidizing? I would call it stop freeloading... Quality news has a cost.
- barney54 6y ago
  How is it freeloading? I don’t understand this point of view, but I want to understand your perspective.
  - eastendguy 6y ago
    Reporter A spends 50 hours researching and writing about a topic. She publishes it on her own blog. Now I scrape this text (as summary) and display it on my own "Latest news" blog and the original author does often not even get a click-through. I do not think that is fair towards the original author.
    - eastendguy 6y ago
      PS: Downvoting just because you disagree is not how a discussion is supposed to work :-(
      - mafuy 6y ago
        I can't even downvote on this site, but I think it is because your post seems to say Google News copies news without a link to the source, which is not the case.
    - vertis 6y ago
      Same reporter "borrows" a photo/video editorially and doesn't pay the creator[0][1]. [0]: http://gakuran.com/daily-mail-used-my-photos-without-permission-and-without-payment/ http://gakuran.com/daily-mail-used-my-photos-without-permiss... [1]: https://expertphotography.com/the-daily-mail-stole-my-photos-i-got-paid/ https://expertphotography.com/the-daily-mail-stole-my-photos... (Note this guy eventually got paid by chasing)
    - dmortin 6y ago
      If the reporter lives from ads on her blog then she needs traffic, because more traffic is more income. So bringig traffic to the blog is a big value, so she should pay for this service. But she doesn't, because search engines are free. News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.
      - La1n 6y ago
        >News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic. I was feeling different about this topic until you brought this up. I think this is a really good argument. Yes, google scrapes and gets value from what they scrape without paying, however you can block this as a publisher if you don't want this.
        ketzu 6y ago
        The problem these attempts try to adress is that it's not a real choice: doing that would likely end your business, while boycotting would have little effect on google/Facebook. So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.
        vageli 6y ago
        > So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power. You do have a choice though. You can choose not to use google ads and stop performing SEO and drive business in alternative ways. Further, there are more search engines than just google. If your business model depends on google it may be time to rethink that strategy. Any competent marketing strategy would rely on diversified channels anyway.
      - eberkund 6y ago
        The search engines also receive value in being an index or directory that people can use to lookup articles. The situation here is somewhat unique because Google is in a position to reap all of the benefit from this relationship by just scraping the content and displaying it directly to the user. A comparable scenario would be something like the phone book or yelp where these directories have value to users but they simply refer users to the businesses advertising in the directory.
    - iso1631 6y ago
      It seem blatent copyright infringement to me.
    - CM30 6y ago
      Isn't that pretty much all news works? After all, investigations are a rarity, and most stories in media outlets are basically sourced/paraphrased from elsewhere. If one site/network/paper finds something interesting like this, you bet anything that every other outlet will have their own story on the subject online in the next few minutes. To some degree it's also how aggregator sites like Reddit and Hacker News work. Maybe even with anti paywall methods, archivers, etc getting the story in plain text format.
    - diffeomorphism 6y ago
      That would be copyright infringement and is already illegal. Not the topic of discussion.
- nailer 6y ago
  The law prevents Google from removing their results. Ie the news companies are freeloading from Google.
  - eastendguy 6y ago
    Google is a de-facto monopoly for search.
    - kittiepryde 6y ago
      Use bing or duckduckgo, which you can find via Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=search+engines+that+are+not+Google&oq=search+engines+that+are+not+Google https://www.google.com/search?q=search+engines+that+are+not+... Exercise your consumer choice.
      - zentiggr 6y ago
        Until enough people do that, Google still has 90%+ of the general search traffic. De facto monopoly.
        jayrice257 6y ago
        For good reason because the other search engines have historically been garbage in comparison
        pb7 6y ago
        Being the superior product while numerous alternatives exist that perform similarly is not a monopoly.
  - tandr 6y ago
    Does it prevent it from stop indexing these sites? Imagine it does display "latest news" snippets, but from 3 months ago...
- DigitalSea 6y ago
  >Quality news has a cost Have you seen what Murdoch-owned media publish these days? It's biased clickbait and gossip, there is nothing quality about News Corp content. Look at the front-page of news.com.au and you'll see what alleged News Corp quality news looks like. There are much better news sources out there not crying about Google (and writing quality investigative journalism) like; crikey.com.au, abc.net.au, theguardian.com.au, theconversation.com/au, independentaustralia.net, michaelwest.com.au.
  - bobthechef 6y ago
    Hardly unique to Murdoch-owned media. Perhaps you're allow your own political biases narrow your perception.
    - DigitalSea 6y ago
      We weren't discussing the uniqueness of low-quality content or clickbait, nor were we even discussing politics. We are discussing the introduction of changes which will largely benefit News Corp who owns 70% of newspaper circulation, Rupert Murdoch isn't even Australian. It boggles my mind an American media mogul (with clear historically proven cases of political bias) cannot only have plenty of influence in the USA, but also here in Australia. We talk about Google and Facebook being these influential corporate conglomerates (and they are), how bad monopolies are and all the while, News Corp continues to get favours from the Australian government, if it's not millions in no strings attached money, it's laws like these which should not even exist in their current form. And the kicker here is: News Corp doesn't even pay tax in Australia. Thanks to some clever accounting (which others are also guilty of), they pay no tax on their profits and they are expecting us to feel sorry for them? Shouldn't the fact they don't even pay tax be good enough. There are a lot of clickbait/low-quality news sites, but the ones not owned by Rupert Murdoch or big media companies aren't complaining to the Australian government about how unfair it is Google is linking to their news and providing free snippets. Things get even crazier when you realise that many news sites in Australia (especially News Corp) are already paywalled, many of the links from Google to the news stories results in a paywall notice asking you to pay. You essentially get a headline and an opening paragraph. Sometimes the headlines are clever, but they're not worth paying for. So, are they asking Facebook and Google to pay for the privilege of being able to link to their own site for free, which they are subsequently monetising through ads and subscriptions? None of this makes sense. I agree that good quality journalism is worth paying for, which is why I personally have both a Crikey subscription as well as a Guardian subscription. I would never pay for the Courier Mail or Australian, the content is subpar and often republished news from other sources. Even former Fairfix news which Nine Entertainment purchased have gone downhill since the purchase.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaway2474 6y ago
It’s likely an attempt by the libs to buy favour with the Murdoch press, who have traditionally had a lot of control over election outcomes.
- asddubs 6y ago
  has appeasement honestly ever worked?
  - throwaway2474 6y ago
    What do you mean? News Corp definitely has a sizeable influence over elections, or at least they have had in the past. So it works in that sense.
    - asddubs 6y ago
      yeah but that's not really how rupert murdoch media make their decisions, is it?
      - chillfox 6y ago
        Well, Murdoch always support the liberals/conservatives but if he doesn’t get what he wants then he starts enthusiastically encouraging a good stabbing/knifing (rolling the prime mister).
  - pjc50 6y ago
    That was more or less how New Labour got elected in the UK in the late 90s.
  - stephen_g 6y ago
    It’s not appeasement - the Liberal National Party and the Murdoch press have more of a ‘symbiotic relationship’.
chillfox 6y ago
Yes, you could consider it a tax (or rabbit) on large digital platforms to support commercial news corporations.

So this is just a very roundabout way of subsidizing Australian news media without having to call it that.

eastendguy 6y ago

Subsidizing? I would call it stop freeloading... Quality news has a cost.

barney54 6y ago
How is it freeloading? I don’t understand this point of view, but I want to understand your perspective.
- eastendguy 6y ago
  Reporter A spends 50 hours researching and writing about a topic. She publishes it on her own blog. Now I scrape this text (as summary) and display it on my own "Latest news" blog and the original author does often not even get a click-through. I do not think that is fair towards the original author.
  - eastendguy 6y ago
    PS: Downvoting just because you disagree is not how a discussion is supposed to work :-(
    - mafuy 6y ago
      I can't even downvote on this site, but I think it is because your post seems to say Google News copies news without a link to the source, which is not the case.
  - vertis 6y ago
    Same reporter "borrows" a photo/video editorially and doesn't pay the creator[0][1]. [0]: http://gakuran.com/daily-mail-used-my-photos-without-permission-and-without-payment/ http://gakuran.com/daily-mail-used-my-photos-without-permiss... [1]: https://expertphotography.com/the-daily-mail-stole-my-photos-i-got-paid/ https://expertphotography.com/the-daily-mail-stole-my-photos... (Note this guy eventually got paid by chasing)
  - dmortin 6y ago
    If the reporter lives from ads on her blog then she needs traffic, because more traffic is more income. So bringig traffic to the blog is a big value, so she should pay for this service. But she doesn't, because search engines are free. News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.
    - La1n 6y ago
      >News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic. I was feeling different about this topic until you brought this up. I think this is a really good argument. Yes, google scrapes and gets value from what they scrape without paying, however you can block this as a publisher if you don't want this.
      - ketzu 6y ago
        The problem these attempts try to adress is that it's not a real choice: doing that would likely end your business, while boycotting would have little effect on google/Facebook. So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.
        vageli 6y ago
        > So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power. You do have a choice though. You can choose not to use google ads and stop performing SEO and drive business in alternative ways. Further, there are more search engines than just google. If your business model depends on google it may be time to rethink that strategy. Any competent marketing strategy would rely on diversified channels anyway.
    - eberkund 6y ago
      The search engines also receive value in being an index or directory that people can use to lookup articles. The situation here is somewhat unique because Google is in a position to reap all of the benefit from this relationship by just scraping the content and displaying it directly to the user. A comparable scenario would be something like the phone book or yelp where these directories have value to users but they simply refer users to the businesses advertising in the directory.
  - iso1631 6y ago
    It seem blatent copyright infringement to me.
  - CM30 6y ago
    Isn't that pretty much all news works? After all, investigations are a rarity, and most stories in media outlets are basically sourced/paraphrased from elsewhere. If one site/network/paper finds something interesting like this, you bet anything that every other outlet will have their own story on the subject online in the next few minutes. To some degree it's also how aggregator sites like Reddit and Hacker News work. Maybe even with anti paywall methods, archivers, etc getting the story in plain text format.
  - diffeomorphism 6y ago
    That would be copyright infringement and is already illegal. Not the topic of discussion.
nailer 6y ago
The law prevents Google from removing their results. Ie the news companies are freeloading from Google.
- eastendguy 6y ago
  Google is a de-facto monopoly for search.
  - kittiepryde 6y ago
    Use bing or duckduckgo, which you can find via Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=search+engines+that+are+not+Google&oq=search+engines+that+are+not+Google https://www.google.com/search?q=search+engines+that+are+not+... Exercise your consumer choice.
    - zentiggr 6y ago
      Until enough people do that, Google still has 90%+ of the general search traffic. De facto monopoly.
      - jayrice257 6y ago
        For good reason because the other search engines have historically been garbage in comparison
      - pb7 6y ago
        Being the superior product while numerous alternatives exist that perform similarly is not a monopoly.
- tandr 6y ago
  Does it prevent it from stop indexing these sites? Imagine it does display "latest news" snippets, but from 3 months ago...
DigitalSea 6y ago
>Quality news has a cost Have you seen what Murdoch-owned media publish these days? It's biased clickbait and gossip, there is nothing quality about News Corp content. Look at the front-page of news.com.au and you'll see what alleged News Corp quality news looks like. There are much better news sources out there not crying about Google (and writing quality investigative journalism) like; crikey.com.au, abc.net.au, theguardian.com.au, theconversation.com/au, independentaustralia.net, michaelwest.com.au.
- bobthechef 6y ago
  Hardly unique to Murdoch-owned media. Perhaps you're allow your own political biases narrow your perception.
  - DigitalSea 6y ago
    We weren't discussing the uniqueness of low-quality content or clickbait, nor were we even discussing politics. We are discussing the introduction of changes which will largely benefit News Corp who owns 70% of newspaper circulation, Rupert Murdoch isn't even Australian. It boggles my mind an American media mogul (with clear historically proven cases of political bias) cannot only have plenty of influence in the USA, but also here in Australia. We talk about Google and Facebook being these influential corporate conglomerates (and they are), how bad monopolies are and all the while, News Corp continues to get favours from the Australian government, if it's not millions in no strings attached money, it's laws like these which should not even exist in their current form. And the kicker here is: News Corp doesn't even pay tax in Australia. Thanks to some clever accounting (which others are also guilty of), they pay no tax on their profits and they are expecting us to feel sorry for them? Shouldn't the fact they don't even pay tax be good enough. There are a lot of clickbait/low-quality news sites, but the ones not owned by Rupert Murdoch or big media companies aren't complaining to the Australian government about how unfair it is Google is linking to their news and providing free snippets. Things get even crazier when you realise that many news sites in Australia (especially News Corp) are already paywalled, many of the links from Google to the news stories results in a paywall notice asking you to pay. You essentially get a headline and an opening paragraph. Sometimes the headlines are clever, but they're not worth paying for. So, are they asking Facebook and Google to pay for the privilege of being able to link to their own site for free, which they are subsequently monetising through ads and subscriptions? None of this makes sense. I agree that good quality journalism is worth paying for, which is why I personally have both a Crikey subscription as well as a Guardian subscription. I would never pay for the Courier Mail or Australian, the content is subpar and often republished news from other sources. Even former Fairfix news which Nine Entertainment purchased have gone downhill since the purchase.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwaway2474 6y ago

It’s likely an attempt by the libs to buy favour with the Murdoch press, who have traditionally had a lot of control over election outcomes.

asddubs 6y ago
has appeasement honestly ever worked?
- throwaway2474 6y ago
  What do you mean? News Corp definitely has a sizeable influence over elections, or at least they have had in the past. So it works in that sense.
  - asddubs 6y ago
    yeah but that's not really how rupert murdoch media make their decisions, is it?
    - chillfox 6y ago
      Well, Murdoch always support the liberals/conservatives but if he doesn’t get what he wants then he starts enthusiastically encouraging a good stabbing/knifing (rolling the prime mister).
- pjc50 6y ago
  That was more or less how New Labour got elected in the UK in the late 90s.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  It’s not appeasement - the Liberal National Party and the Murdoch press have more of a ‘symbiotic relationship’.

chillfox 6y ago

Yes, you could consider it a tax (or rabbit) on large digital platforms to support commercial news corporations.