3 ms·
The news sites can certainly add a robots.txt page or stop crawling from Facebook/Google in other ways. I'd even be fine with the law saying "Google/Facebook ca
by patmcc 4y ago
The news sites can certainly add a robots.txt page or stop crawling from Facebook/Google in other ways. I'd even be fine with the law saying "Google/Facebook can't do automated summaries of the page content" or whatever, allow that to be opt-in/out.
The bullshit part is saying Google has to pay for the privilege of linking out to the sites. Ridiculous.
- HDThoreaun 4y agoThe issue with this is that news is largely fungible. If any news source adds a robots.txt that stops aggregators than other news sources will instantly rip off their content and put it on google. Since they don't actually employ any journalists but just an AI summarizer bot their expenses are low enough that they can make money off the few people who actually click the link. The problem with this strategy is that eventually all the actual news sources will run out of money and the journalists will be laid off, at which point there's no news for the scalper sites to copy.
- varispeed 4y agoThat's just your assumption. Don't get me wrong - it sounds plausible, but it is unlikely that such scenario would have played out. Maybe we have too many news outlets - you can even read that some employ AI already to write articles for them. They are going for quantity over quality. There are always going to be people wanting to gossip over a headline and if a news source doesn't provide much beyond that, are they actually providing anything of value? When we didn't have internet, many people would have looked at newspapers on display and discussed headlines without actually buying a newspaper. Was it a problem then?