If publishers aren’t paying, what did you mean by this, exactly: > Publishers' relevance on, say, Google, relies partly on sponsored contents. They pay Google

If publishers aren’t paying, what did you mean by this, exactly: > Publishers' relevance on, say, Google, relies partly on sponsored contents. They pay Google for this. I understand that Google has optimized to avoid the user clicking away. Obviously, this has been done to keep eyeballs and revenue but it is also arguably in the user’s interest as they accomplish their goals faster. The logical response for this is not to force Google to pay for listing and summarizing links, but to evolve your own business model. Say by moving towards richer, more thoughtful content and analysis that can’t be trivially summarized and might even support a non-ad-based model, such as subscriptions or donations. (I pay for quite a few subscriptions that host content like this.) The basic news business has obviously become increasingly commoditized, and I don’t think anything Google does is going to change this. The Wikipedia example is actually supporting the viability of good content being a defense for commoditization, not the argument that Google needs to pay content creators to survive. I don’t think there’s any evidence to support the idea that Google summarizing in a one box has harmed Wikipedia, as the Wikimedia foundation has continued to substantially grow its revenue every year and is at all time highs. Arguably, this is because they host content that is sufficiently rich that they are bound to have a decent click-through rate; whereas many news publishers are basically rewriting AP releases with little value add. > They should be if Chipotle was virtually the only restaurant in town, and the only way for you to get food, which is essentially what Google is in the search space. It is a strange proposition that if someone doesn’t like the only restaurant in town then it has a moral obligation to close its doors. It’s not like you have an obligation to go there; in this analogy consider opening a new restaurant as trying to do direct ad selling, but you can just as easily “cook at home” by shifting your business model. It might be different if the business was critical and had total monopoly (e.g. water, power) but I’m not sure this holds here. Just as the restaurant is not required to cater to your specific tastes, I don’t think Google should be required to subsidize a specific publishing business model. It feels like a very narrow form of digital Luddism. Now maybe they are somewhat parasitic in this case, and would be smart to figure an more mutually beneficial arrangement (just as the restaurant would be smart to cater broadly to local tastes), but I wouldn’t go so far as to say “should” or expect any mandate to do so.