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Lawmakers Want to Protect Local Newspapers From Google, Facebook

105 points by choppaface 6y ago

KingMachiavelli 6y ago
Google will just point out than any website can block their scraping with a robots.txt and they will just say they will stop using news if they are forced to pay. And from one of the articles linked: > But the immediate boost in readership won’t offset the virus’s brutal impact on the pillars holding up the business, publishing executives say. Local advertising spending could fall this year by at least a quarter, amounting to a decline of more than $30 billion, according to one estimate. The issue is more than online advertisements aren't very lucrative (although Google's monopoly in that area could play a role in that and gives them some power to retaliate). Frankly, I just don't see the general population willing to pay as much for news as it did in the past. The big stories will be available for free somewhere and even local news can be found on Twitter/social media.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  >Frankly, I just don't see the general population willing to pay as much for news as it did in the past. The big stories will be available for free somewhere and even local news can be found on Twitter/social media. The Wall Street Journal seems to be making its paywall work. I think the New York Times's semi-paywall is doing OK, but that's more to do with the massive surge in readers it gained after ramping up its attacks on Trump after the 2016 election. In specialty publications, The Athletic is doing well enough to hire new beat writers. Patch is making a profit with ad-driven hyperlocal news. Otherwise, I agree that straight news publications that aren't the Times or the Journal (and maybe the Washington Post, but it also benefits from anti-Trump sentiment, even aside from the bottomless Bezos cash)—that is, without the brand name—just don't seem viable. When the brand-name publications handle national and international news, Reuters and AP handle other stuff, and Craigslist took away classifieds 20 years ago, where is the room for the average city journal? The answer that most sensible people came to years ago is "There isn't". The only other viable model seems to be ownership by a) nonprofit charities, or b) wealthy people who enjoy the attention from owning the local newspaper.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    I would guess wealthy people who own multiple not-local-to-them newspapers are funding the legislators in TFA.
ffpip 6y ago
Google gives special preference to AMP sites in search, images and google news. Google is also removing non-AMP URLs from Google News. fucking everything is loaded from their servers nowadays
- ec109685 6y ago
  They removed the special preference: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-ex...
  - ffpip 6y ago
    Yeah, but they got what they wanted. Every news site enabled AMP, and nobody will change it back now.
- cute_boi 6y ago
  ads is literally destroying internet and these ads company are milking so much profit and we cannot do anything otherthan using adblocker and firefox :(
  - amelius 6y ago
    Yes, it seems that ads are at the root of many problems (e.g. user tracking, overconsumption). Perhaps this is what the senate should be addressing instead. However, currently ads are also a driving force behind the internet.
  - Hokusai 6y ago
    That is a great point. We are creating an Internet-nightmare in a Red Queen's race. Advertise companies compete in price to get the best target audience increasing prices and lowering value. Users are bombarded with creepy ads that follow them around the internet and allow to all kind of abuses. Google/Facebook profit from both sides dictating the rules and create echo chambers that feet in hate and outrage to increase views. Quite a dystopia all to send ads to people, that were already receiving them anyway.
- 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wilt 6y ago
I hate AMP. It is just a tech to give google more control. Anything to helps kill it off is a good thing. It is possible to create pages that load fast on mobile without it.
- ec109685 6y ago
  Not as fast AMP given a website like google can’t safely preload and prerender a normal website’s content.
- dheera 6y ago
  Yeah but sometimes it gets around paywalls. free non-AMP >> free AMP >> paywalled non-AMP
- plasma 6y ago
  Reddit's AMP is terrible, I wish I could opt-out.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    Reddit's AMP implementation makes me think they genuinely stopped giving a fuck about users.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      They must have calculated they can't survive at their current ad impression rates, hence the forcing people onto their app at literally any cost these days. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if the app actually worked well, but it doesn't
      - Google234 6y ago
        Are there more ads on the app?
        ffpip 6y ago
        They push awards and coins heavily on the app. Like you get constant prompts to spend money on fake karma, digital coins and stuff
septillianator 6y ago
The media cycle is a money grab anyway you slice.I couldnt careless about the misfortune of any news medium while things are in the current state. Everyone of them prioritize their news coverage based on clicks. 2020 has been the gold rush for all media big or small capitalizing on a nation that is falling apart.A complete overhaul of media is needed. Not this tid for tat. Put some energy in the places that matter.
godelmachine 6y ago
Welcome this. I switched over to FF only because of AMP.
vkaku 6y ago
IMO: Any protocol or mechanism written by Google is surely to give it more control over the Internet, hence advertising and hence revenue. Not only AMP, but HTTP 2, QUIC, DNS over HTTPS are all things that Google wanted to have control over. I certainly hope the free internet moves into Tor and the rest of the dark web, and is certainly not indexable by Google. Also, stop using Google Chrome if you wish to do the web a favor.
- qz2 6y ago
  Agreed. But I think we should go back to Gopher for content and the old wild west style Internet which wasn't consolidated into silos like now. It's cheap, efficient, understandable and obtuse enough not to be able to leverage people into silos for commercial purposes.
- tester34 6y ago
  >Also, stop using Google Chrome if you wish to do the web a favor. It's very risky and tricky, but I think it is completely opposite. Do not use Firefox/DDG or other non-google competitors if you wish to do the web a favor. edit. >to do the web a favor (by splitting Google).
- throwaway189262 6y ago
  Android is the worst part of their monopoly. They control everything on the phone down to the hardware. Mobile desperately needs an "IBM compatible" moment to usher in free use of other operating systems
  - iso1210 6y ago
    https://ausdroid.net/2020/10/28/xda-made-a-phone-damn-right-they-did-and-its-got-a-mechanical-keyboard/ https://ausdroid.net/2020/10/28/xda-made-a-phone-damn-right-...
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
      Thank you for sharing this :)
tester34 6y ago
I still remember reading article about how Google tried their first quasi AMP service around 2005 or something like that As far as I've read they were serving pages to people with other people's data like "Hello, {username}" and stuff, generally security nightmare. Unfortunely I do not remember how it was named... edit. >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator >Google Web Accelerator sent requests for web pages, except for secure web pages (HTTPS), to Google, which logged these requests. Some web pages embedded personal information in these page requests. >Google received and temporarily cached cookie data that your computer sent with webpage requests in order to improve performance. >Google crawled every web page it came across leading it to inadvertently deleting web pages.[1] >In order to speed up delivery of content, Google Web Accelerator sometimes retrieved webpage content that the user did not request, and stored it in the Google Web Accelerator cache[2]. Some law experts and IT authors affirmed that Google would "combine personal and clickstream data with existing search history data contained in Google's own cookie"[3] >Google Web Accelerator is no longer available for, or supported by, Google as of January 20, 2008. As of 2008 the Google Web Accelerator is not compatible with Firefox 3.0. Google Web Accelerator is still available for download from other websites. The Labs experiment launched in 2005 was discontinued and no longer supported by Google, since January 2009
madrox 6y ago
AMP is bad. I’m not sure if AMP policed by the FTC is better.
specialist 6y ago
It's super weird that news aggregators aren't directly funding OC. How does "news" work when most of the content creators go out of business? (Edit: Huh. I guess we already know, because that's exactly what happened.) Compare news to other OC, like books, music, video, podcasts, and apps. Musicians get paid. Kinda. (I'm not smart enough to figure out if Apple/Beats is some kind of label, meaning underwriting (?) OC.) And music videos definitely get ad revenue sharing (YouTube & Vevo). Book authors get paid. Kinda. Isn't one of Amazon's properties now an imprint, or publisher, or whatever that segment's underwriters (?) called? Video definitely gets paid. Streaming, snippets (Vine and now TikTok style), vlogging, sports, episodic TV, movies, miniseries (Netflix), etc. EVERYONE is paying for OC video. It's a strategic differentiator. Podcasters get paid. (Per power laws distribution.) Like video, EVERYONE is trying to get into the game, funding OC. Ditto apps. -- So why is "news" different? If I was Apple, today, I'd set up some kind of huge trust with the sole purpose of funding any and all new "journalism" OC. No strings attached. I'd open the flood gates for funding OC. Huge, big, and small. Copy every kind of philanthropic funding idea. Have a huge fund for traditional news organizations serving int'l, national, state, and local markets. Do whatever Corp for Public Broadcasting does for PBS. Dump money into other trusts funding OC, directly or thru partnerships. One off grants for indie bloggers and investigative reporters. Recurring funding for activism style journalism. I'd reinvent "new bureaus" to recreate "embedded" journalism, so reporters can get paid to cover city hall. I'd create infrastructure for fund raising. So other listener supported media can more easily replicate the success of KEXP. I'd figure out a "startup school" incubator so that wannabe working journalists and bloggers learn how to get paid. Music and film and writing communities have their own ecosystems of conventions, workshops, meetups. Fund the same for journalism. And just like the new style purpose driven philanthropists, I'd have some kind of metrics. Internal and external. Rewarding both effort and successes. Imagine funding an arts critic, say someone(s) reporting on the ballet and dance community. Their victory conditions would be very different than someone reporting on current events. Edit: Two more ideas: Endowments for schools of journalism. Create and fund more awards, prizes. -- It's painfully unobvious to me why journalism, reporting isn't being funded. Google and Facebook benefit tremendously, economically, from OC. Are these parasites worried they'll kill their hosts? Why suggest Apple? I dunno. Two reasons. It just seems to me that they'd understand best how to benefit from PBS style shoutouts like "This programing was made possible thru the generous support of Apple Community Trust and other supporters just like you." And like privacy, their hands-off relationship with journalism OC would be a terrific "brand laddering" strategy that Facebook (Zuck) and Google (Page, Brin) are unable to replicate, because they are constitutionally incapable of ceding control. Seeing how Bezos seems to have managed Wash post, future Bezos may have something closer to enlightened altruism. I can kinda imagine Jack Dorsey creating a trust for OC. His recent giving pledge org is impressive. But given Twitter's continued schizophrenia, I just don't think he has a compelling (reality based) thesis or worldview for journalism. And insert the cliche about asking someone who created the problem to then turnaround and fix the problem. Bonus third reason: Maybe Apple would be better are coaxing journalists to optimize for Apple News. Something like WWDC for written OC. Thoughts? Ideas? Reactions?
curryst 6y ago
This won't save them, the local newspaper is doomed. Local papers have always functioned as a sort of news aggregator. They aggregate local news together with national news and serve you that as a sort of localized feed of information. It's similar to Reddit; the NYT and national news are like /r/worldnews (purely in topic, not content) and local papers are like your city's subreddit. Letters to the Editor are like comments. Theyre actually so similar that Reddit et al are killing them. Reddit even often has local reporting from Redditors; I find out about lots of happenings directly from Redditors. I think national news will likely survive in some form because of the investigation required (and the legitimacy granted by an organization like the NYT reporting on it), but local papers are going to go the way of the pay phone.
- jdeibele 6y ago
  To chime in: The local newspaper went from being delivered 7 days a week as a folded newspaper to being delivered 4 days a week in a tabloid form that's about 60% the size of the old format. We cancelled then, and probably a lot of other people did, too. We recently subscribed for 1 year as a gesture to "save our local newspaper". As part of that, we get the Sunday paper for free. Our last one is still in the plastic wrapper just inside the door. 4 days after we got it, none of us (2 parents, 2 high school students, 1 college student) have bothered to open it. Our local paper is part of the Advance chain. Their website is terrible and it doesn't seem to be updated very often. Probably they have some sort of PDF format that is hard to use or even worse a custom app that basically acts as a magnifying glass on a small section of the page. What I want from a local paper: local stuff. I don't care about their opinion on national issues and The NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc. are just a click away. In another universe, newspapers could have capitalized on the fact that they had <subscribers> by making free online ads, discussion forums, etc. Yes, there'd be some moderation issues but it's a lot easier if you've got paying customers. Don't want to subscribe? Can't comment. Can't post an ad. Maybe can't respond to an ad. They pissed that all away by making their content free. Now their content is basically worthless and there's nowhere for them to go.
  - cutemonster 6y ago

105 points by choppaface 6y ago

Google will just point out than any website can block their scraping with a robots.txt and they will just say they will stop using news if they are forced to pay. And from one of the articles linked: > But the immediate boost in readership won’t offset the virus’s brutal impact on the pillars holding up the business, publishing executives say. Local advertising spending could fall this year by at least a quarter, amounting to a decline of more than $30 billion, according to one estimate. The issue is more than online advertisements aren't very lucrative (although Google's monopoly in that area could play a role in that and gives them some power to retaliate). Frankly, I just don't see the general population willing to pay as much for news as it did in the past. The big stories will be available for free somewhere and even local news can be found on Twitter/social media.

TMWNN 6y ago
>Frankly, I just don't see the general population willing to pay as much for news as it did in the past. The big stories will be available for free somewhere and even local news can be found on Twitter/social media. The Wall Street Journal seems to be making its paywall work. I think the New York Times's semi-paywall is doing OK, but that's more to do with the massive surge in readers it gained after ramping up its attacks on Trump after the 2016 election. In specialty publications, The Athletic is doing well enough to hire new beat writers. Patch is making a profit with ad-driven hyperlocal news. Otherwise, I agree that straight news publications that aren't the Times or the Journal (and maybe the Washington Post, but it also benefits from anti-Trump sentiment, even aside from the bottomless Bezos cash)—that is, without the brand name—just don't seem viable. When the brand-name publications handle national and international news, Reuters and AP handle other stuff, and Craigslist took away classifieds 20 years ago, where is the room for the average city journal? The answer that most sensible people came to years ago is "There isn't". The only other viable model seems to be ownership by a) nonprofit charities, or b) wealthy people who enjoy the attention from owning the local newspaper.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  I would guess wealthy people who own multiple not-local-to-them newspapers are funding the legislators in TFA.

ffpip 6y ago

Google gives special preference to AMP sites in search, images and google news. Google is also removing non-AMP URLs from Google News. fucking everything is loaded from their servers nowadays

ec109685 6y ago
They removed the special preference: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-experience.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2020/05/evaluating-page-ex...
- ffpip 6y ago
  Yeah, but they got what they wanted. Every news site enabled AMP, and nobody will change it back now.
cute_boi 6y ago
ads is literally destroying internet and these ads company are milking so much profit and we cannot do anything otherthan using adblocker and firefox :(
- amelius 6y ago
  Yes, it seems that ads are at the root of many problems (e.g. user tracking, overconsumption). Perhaps this is what the senate should be addressing instead. However, currently ads are also a driving force behind the internet.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  That is a great point. We are creating an Internet-nightmare in a Red Queen's race. Advertise companies compete in price to get the best target audience increasing prices and lowering value. Users are bombarded with creepy ads that follow them around the internet and allow to all kind of abuses. Google/Facebook profit from both sides dictating the rules and create echo chambers that feet in hate and outrage to increase views. Quite a dystopia all to send ads to people, that were already receiving them anyway.
6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wilt 6y ago

I hate AMP. It is just a tech to give google more control. Anything to helps kill it off is a good thing. It is possible to create pages that load fast on mobile without it.

ec109685 6y ago
Not as fast AMP given a website like google can’t safely preload and prerender a normal website’s content.
dheera 6y ago
Yeah but sometimes it gets around paywalls. free non-AMP >> free AMP >> paywalled non-AMP
plasma 6y ago
Reddit's AMP is terrible, I wish I could opt-out.
- ffpip 6y ago
  Reddit's AMP implementation makes me think they genuinely stopped giving a fuck about users.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    They must have calculated they can't survive at their current ad impression rates, hence the forcing people onto their app at literally any cost these days. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if the app actually worked well, but it doesn't
    - Google234 6y ago
      Are there more ads on the app?
      - ffpip 6y ago
        They push awards and coins heavily on the app. Like you get constant prompts to spend money on fake karma, digital coins and stuff

septillianator 6y ago

The media cycle is a money grab anyway you slice.I couldnt careless about the misfortune of any news medium while things are in the current state. Everyone of them prioritize their news coverage based on clicks. 2020 has been the gold rush for all media big or small capitalizing on a nation that is falling apart.A complete overhaul of media is needed. Not this tid for tat. Put some energy in the places that matter.

godelmachine 6y ago

Welcome this. I switched over to FF only because of AMP.

vkaku 6y ago

IMO: Any protocol or mechanism written by Google is surely to give it more control over the Internet, hence advertising and hence revenue. Not only AMP, but HTTP 2, QUIC, DNS over HTTPS are all things that Google wanted to have control over. I certainly hope the free internet moves into Tor and the rest of the dark web, and is certainly not indexable by Google. Also, stop using Google Chrome if you wish to do the web a favor.

qz2 6y ago
Agreed. But I think we should go back to Gopher for content and the old wild west style Internet which wasn't consolidated into silos like now. It's cheap, efficient, understandable and obtuse enough not to be able to leverage people into silos for commercial purposes.
tester34 6y ago
>Also, stop using Google Chrome if you wish to do the web a favor. It's very risky and tricky, but I think it is completely opposite. Do not use Firefox/DDG or other non-google competitors if you wish to do the web a favor. edit. >to do the web a favor (by splitting Google).
throwaway189262 6y ago
Android is the worst part of their monopoly. They control everything on the phone down to the hardware. Mobile desperately needs an "IBM compatible" moment to usher in free use of other operating systems
- iso1210 6y ago
  https://ausdroid.net/2020/10/28/xda-made-a-phone-damn-right-they-did-and-its-got-a-mechanical-keyboard/ https://ausdroid.net/2020/10/28/xda-made-a-phone-damn-right-...
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    Thank you for sharing this :)

tester34 6y ago

I still remember reading article about how Google tried their first quasi AMP service around 2005 or something like that As far as I've read they were serving pages to people with other people's data like "Hello, {username}" and stuff, generally security nightmare. Unfortunely I do not remember how it was named... edit. >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator >Google Web Accelerator sent requests for web pages, except for secure web pages (HTTPS), to Google, which logged these requests. Some web pages embedded personal information in these page requests. >Google received and temporarily cached cookie data that your computer sent with webpage requests in order to improve performance. >Google crawled every web page it came across leading it to inadvertently deleting web pages.[1] >In order to speed up delivery of content, Google Web Accelerator sometimes retrieved webpage content that the user did not request, and stored it in the Google Web Accelerator cache[2]. Some law experts and IT authors affirmed that Google would "combine personal and clickstream data with existing search history data contained in Google's own cookie"[3] >Google Web Accelerator is no longer available for, or supported by, Google as of January 20, 2008. As of 2008 the Google Web Accelerator is not compatible with Firefox 3.0. Google Web Accelerator is still available for download from other websites. The Labs experiment launched in 2005 was discontinued and no longer supported by Google, since January 2009

madrox 6y ago

AMP is bad. I’m not sure if AMP policed by the FTC is better.

specialist 6y ago

It's super weird that news aggregators aren't directly funding OC. How does "news" work when most of the content creators go out of business? (Edit: Huh. I guess we already know, because that's exactly what happened.) Compare news to other OC, like books, music, video, podcasts, and apps. Musicians get paid. Kinda. (I'm not smart enough to figure out if Apple/Beats is some kind of label, meaning underwriting (?) OC.) And music videos definitely get ad revenue sharing (YouTube & Vevo). Book authors get paid. Kinda. Isn't one of Amazon's properties now an imprint, or publisher, or whatever that segment's underwriters (?) called? Video definitely gets paid. Streaming, snippets (Vine and now TikTok style), vlogging, sports, episodic TV, movies, miniseries (Netflix), etc. EVERYONE is paying for OC video. It's a strategic differentiator. Podcasters get paid. (Per power laws distribution.) Like video, EVERYONE is trying to get into the game, funding OC. Ditto apps. -- So why is "news" different? If I was Apple, today, I'd set up some kind of huge trust with the sole purpose of funding any and all new "journalism" OC. No strings attached. I'd open the flood gates for funding OC. Huge, big, and small. Copy every kind of philanthropic funding idea. Have a huge fund for traditional news organizations serving int'l, national, state, and local markets. Do whatever Corp for Public Broadcasting does for PBS. Dump money into other trusts funding OC, directly or thru partnerships. One off grants for indie bloggers and investigative reporters. Recurring funding for activism style journalism. I'd reinvent "new bureaus" to recreate "embedded" journalism, so reporters can get paid to cover city hall. I'd create infrastructure for fund raising. So other listener supported media can more easily replicate the success of KEXP. I'd figure out a "startup school" incubator so that wannabe working journalists and bloggers learn how to get paid. Music and film and writing communities have their own ecosystems of conventions, workshops, meetups. Fund the same for journalism. And just like the new style purpose driven philanthropists, I'd have some kind of metrics. Internal and external. Rewarding both effort and successes. Imagine funding an arts critic, say someone(s) reporting on the ballet and dance community. Their victory conditions would be very different than someone reporting on current events. Edit: Two more ideas: Endowments for schools of journalism. Create and fund more awards, prizes. -- It's painfully unobvious to me why journalism, reporting isn't being funded. Google and Facebook benefit tremendously, economically, from OC. Are these parasites worried they'll kill their hosts? Why suggest Apple? I dunno. Two reasons. It just seems to me that they'd understand best how to benefit from PBS style shoutouts like "This programing was made possible thru the generous support of Apple Community Trust and other supporters just like you." And like privacy, their hands-off relationship with journalism OC would be a terrific "brand laddering" strategy that Facebook (Zuck) and Google (Page, Brin) are unable to replicate, because they are constitutionally incapable of ceding control. Seeing how Bezos seems to have managed Wash post, future Bezos may have something closer to enlightened altruism. I can kinda imagine Jack Dorsey creating a trust for OC. His recent giving pledge org is impressive. But given Twitter's continued schizophrenia, I just don't think he has a compelling (reality based) thesis or worldview for journalism. And insert the cliche about asking someone who created the problem to then turnaround and fix the problem. Bonus third reason: Maybe Apple would be better are coaxing journalists to optimize for Apple News. Something like WWDC for written OC. Thoughts? Ideas? Reactions?

curryst 6y ago

This won't save them, the local newspaper is doomed. Local papers have always functioned as a sort of news aggregator. They aggregate local news together with national news and serve you that as a sort of localized feed of information. It's similar to Reddit; the NYT and national news are like /r/worldnews (purely in topic, not content) and local papers are like your city's subreddit. Letters to the Editor are like comments. Theyre actually so similar that Reddit et al are killing them. Reddit even often has local reporting from Redditors; I find out about lots of happenings directly from Redditors. I think national news will likely survive in some form because of the investigation required (and the legitimacy granted by an organization like the NYT reporting on it), but local papers are going to go the way of the pay phone.

jdeibele 6y ago
To chime in: The local newspaper went from being delivered 7 days a week as a folded newspaper to being delivered 4 days a week in a tabloid form that's about 60% the size of the old format. We cancelled then, and probably a lot of other people did, too. We recently subscribed for 1 year as a gesture to "save our local newspaper". As part of that, we get the Sunday paper for free. Our last one is still in the plastic wrapper just inside the door. 4 days after we got it, none of us (2 parents, 2 high school students, 1 college student) have bothered to open it. Our local paper is part of the Advance chain. Their website is terrible and it doesn't seem to be updated very often. Probably they have some sort of PDF format that is hard to use or even worse a custom app that basically acts as a magnifying glass on a small section of the page. What I want from a local paper: local stuff. I don't care about their opinion on national issues and The NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc. are just a click away. In another universe, newspapers could have capitalized on the fact that they had <subscribers> by making free online ads, discussion forums, etc. Yes, there'd be some moderation issues but it's a lot easier if you've got paying customers. Don't want to subscribe? Can't comment. Can't post an ad. Maybe can't respond to an ad. They pissed that all away by making their content free. Now their content is basically worthless and there's nowhere for them to go.
- cutemonster 6y ago