11 ms·

I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearl

by kemayo 3y ago

I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
flavius29663 3y ago
> Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. If you're profiting from it, it's not a bad idea.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  If I run a newsletter that links to interesting properties for sale, should I be charged a fee for this?
  - timothyduong 3y ago
    Maybe if your newsletter gets billions of subscribers and you’re making stacks from it, according to news outlets, yes
- bko 3y ago
  Aren’t you providing marketing to the newspaper? Isn’t that what these news agencies pay google billions for? There’s a whole industry (seo) designed around getting your site linked. This looks like a money grab to me. What am I missing?
- Zak 3y ago
  Why? What moral or legal principle entitles someone to compensation for linking to their website whether or not you're profiting from that? It's a different question when there's an excerpt or machine-generated summary. In that case, copyright applies, and in most jurisdictions it may or may not be fair use depending on what is copied and how it is presented.
- bloppe 3y ago
  It's actually still a bad idea, because nobody will link to you
- estebarb 3y ago
  In that case Google should pay everyone they link to, not just the ones with politician friends that can lobby for themselves. If they don't want a Google to index them they can use robots.txt to prevent it.
  - jtriangle 3y ago
    Exactly. If google showing your site in search results is a problem, it's trivial to remove yourself from said search results, and to prevent your site from ever being crawled in the first place. What's actually happening here is that news media orgs were in a huge bubble because of the advent of the internet, and they've failed to monetize effectively. So they're looking for a revenue source to shore up their failed model, and they know they'd lose revenue if they removed themselves from search results.
    - blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
      I think you’re ignoring that there is a path to getting to users/customers for many types of products like news, which are the tightly controlled platforms of giant tech companies (Google, Meta, etc), and there isn’t viability for products like news unless they play ball with these big tech companies. It’s not that they haven’t monetized effectively, but rather that there are gatekeepers in the way with no real competition, who can steal your margin by showing part of your news story. All of this is really a classic problem of anti-trust, and what a monopoly is today is different from the past but we haven’t acknowledged this properly in my view.
      - freedomben 3y ago
        If that's true (and I agree that it is), then charging for links is going to make it even worse and effectively cement that reality for all time. How is a startup who can't afford to pay employees, let alone publishers, supposed to come by and provide some alternative? Possibly perhaps, the big publishers (with deep pockets and lobbyists) really like this approach because despite entrenching big tech, it erects formidable barriers to entry for new upstart competitors to them? Regulatory capture is a tried and true tactic for industries that reach a certain size. IMHO society is a lot better off trying to prevent summarization efforts (that eliminate the need for the user to visit the page) than they are trying to charge for links. The latter is something that benefits everyone regardless of size. I'm not necessarily in favor of doing that either (would need to think it through a lot more, because it would essentially legislate a worse user experience, which is not something to be done without serious deliberation), but it seems like a much more relevant fight to have and one that isn't so self-serving.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  Well, yeah it is a bad idea. Because if you tax links to your content Google will just stop linking to your content. Which is exactly what they're poised to do, as per TFA.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    If you want less of something, tax it.
    - giuseppe_petri 3y ago
      Or provide a better alternative. Less stick, more carrot.
  - willsmith72 3y ago
    Or is this is all just bargaining and leverage before they make a deal, as they have elsewhere in the world
refulgentis 3y ago
I worked at Google until October 2023, the blog post is in bad faith. This is a good comment that gets at why[1], TL;DR: the hedge fund thing is a complete nonsequitur. The programs are the equivalent of Google Cloud grants, and Google actively disinvested from News[2] just because that was an easy place to get your mandated Sundar cuts for Wall Street. They're not a good steward of anything other than their stock price. I don't like the idea of a link tax but I do know, 100%, that blog post is slanted and mealy-mouthed on everything I know first-hand about. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015572 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/technology/google-layoffs-work-culture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/technology/google-layoffs...
- bevekspldnw 3y ago
  The link tax is a red herring and a poor understanding on the part of legislators. The real issue is pre-adtech publishers kept 100% of ad revenue and double click now takes a massive cut (which they briefly touch on). All that cash flowing into MTV is real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away - it’s also the reason search is entering a utility collapse curve since AI can generate unlimited click bait. Double click will end up killing google, it’s already too late to go back.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Cheers -- I didn't know that. Interesting parallel to the 30% app store wars: people can argue till they're blue in the face with analogy after analogy, and I can easily talk myself into either perspective being obviously correct... ...at the end of the day, I'd be happy to see a tax pass, some mix of what you put excellently as "real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away", and I imagine similar to you given your MTV reference, experiencing there wasn't really anything special going on at BigCo. It's plain old economic inefficiency, not poor beleaguered good guy G that's always looking out for news and just trying to organize the world's information.
    - bevekspldnw 3y ago
WalterBright 3y ago
We welcome all links to dlang.org! No fees!
burnte 3y ago
I actually agree with it too. Google and Facebook aren't the reason news outlets have cash problems and a free teat to latch on to isn't the answer. News is important, but let's fix the problem in a better way.
- adrr 3y ago
  What is the problem with news? Why aren't people willing to pay for it?
  - imzadi 3y ago
    I don't think the issue is that people aren't willing to pay for it. The problem is, there aren't currently good options for paying for it. If I go to a news site and it is paywalled, I just leave. I am not going to subscribe to every single newspaper. If I could easily pay for today's paper (not an individual news story or a full subscription) without giving up all my persona info, I would probably buy 2 - 3 papers a day from various sources.
    - alistairSH 3y ago
      $40/year for the WaPo and you can pay with PayPal or Apple. You don’t give them any more money than any other online vendor.
      - bawolff 3y ago
        That price point seems high. For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.
        lupire 3y ago
        It is high because most people don't want to pay for a share of news. They'd rather watch TV, and not even the best TV. If you want the best, you need to pay for Max and Disney and Apple and Amazon and the rest.
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
Just to think about this more, are there any other business types, besides online news, where your success so radically depends on the decisions (read google news ranking and summarization algorithms) of some other business that you have zero relations with. Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in the economy? EDIT: the criteria of zero business relationship between your entire product class and the Big Business is critical; otherwise lots of examples exist.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Consumer reports (both the company and the category). A bad review can destroy a company. Yelp. TripAdvisor.
- jedberg 3y ago
  Any retail store. Like Costco and Walmart. They can break an entire company by just buying from a competitor.
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    There is a business relationship between Walmart/Costco and the product or a competitor of the product. In the Google News case, there is no business relation with any news site (Alphabet ads might have a relation with the news site, but that is not Google News).
    - lupire 3y ago
      Google News is a customer who walks into Walmart consumes the free samples and tells people about them. Walmart is free to ban Google from the premises (robots.txt) or to negotiate an exchange (monetization agreement).
  - jacobgkau 3y ago
    I think they key is that in your example, Cosco/Walmart was "buying" from the company and is now "buying" from a competitor. Google's typically not "buying" from anyone when they choose who to list on their pages (only "selling" exposure, in cases of paid advertising).
Ferret7446 3y ago
> It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing Does it? If I summarize a book, do I need to pay a fee? News (much like recipes) is not directly covered by copyright (facts cannot be copyrighted). Only the expression (exact wording) is (which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story).
- jacobgkau 3y ago
  Legality aside, I can understand how reading a short news article (especially when paying only via ad views) and then summarizing information that lots of people are probably interested in right at this moment is likely to be more detrimental to a writer's business model than reading an entire book (possibly after purchasing a copy) and then summarizing information that's likely to be less timely.
- account42 3y ago
  > which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story I see this claimed often but it doesn't make any sense - anyone can still copy the recipe without the story and then the copy would even provide more value than the original. Seems to me padding recipes with fluff is mostly about SEO and maximizing ad impressions.
cush 3y ago
Google has single-handely ruined the internet, and absolutely warped our expectations around what the economics of content creation looks like online. Google earns money from that content. Why wouldn’t the content creators be entitled to a cut?
- account42 3y ago
  Oh please, most content online was shared freely long before google came along. On the contrary, it's the for-profit content creators and to a much bigger extend the monetizing platforms that have latched on to the open web and are now trying to redefine it. Meanwhile, most content is still created by users like you and me who are not going to get any of the ad profits these platforms are crying about.
  - cush 3y ago
    Oh please, what? There’s nothing wrong or malicious or un-open with running a business by selling content online. You’re deeply confusing open and free. A marketplace built on open standards is still open. Google has been at the helm of the web for at least 15 years. “Before Google came along” was before the consolidation of the internet. Google consolidated the internet behind Search, their browser, SEO, even Amp pages (remember that dumpster fire? So open, right?), as they slowly tolled more and more of the internet, while keeping traffic flowing to their advertisers. Content creators are entitled to a cut of the profits that Google makes from selling ads while presenting their content. I hope this law passes and every other state follows suit.

by kemayo 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

flavius29663 3y ago

> Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. If you're profiting from it, it's not a bad idea.

CalRobert 3y ago
If I run a newsletter that links to interesting properties for sale, should I be charged a fee for this?
- timothyduong 3y ago
  Maybe if your newsletter gets billions of subscribers and you’re making stacks from it, according to news outlets, yes
bko 3y ago
Aren’t you providing marketing to the newspaper? Isn’t that what these news agencies pay google billions for? There’s a whole industry (seo) designed around getting your site linked. This looks like a money grab to me. What am I missing?
Zak 3y ago
Why? What moral or legal principle entitles someone to compensation for linking to their website whether or not you're profiting from that? It's a different question when there's an excerpt or machine-generated summary. In that case, copyright applies, and in most jurisdictions it may or may not be fair use depending on what is copied and how it is presented.
bloppe 3y ago
It's actually still a bad idea, because nobody will link to you
estebarb 3y ago
In that case Google should pay everyone they link to, not just the ones with politician friends that can lobby for themselves. If they don't want a Google to index them they can use robots.txt to prevent it.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  Exactly. If google showing your site in search results is a problem, it's trivial to remove yourself from said search results, and to prevent your site from ever being crawled in the first place. What's actually happening here is that news media orgs were in a huge bubble because of the advent of the internet, and they've failed to monetize effectively. So they're looking for a revenue source to shore up their failed model, and they know they'd lose revenue if they removed themselves from search results.
  - blackeyeblitzar 3y ago
    I think you’re ignoring that there is a path to getting to users/customers for many types of products like news, which are the tightly controlled platforms of giant tech companies (Google, Meta, etc), and there isn’t viability for products like news unless they play ball with these big tech companies. It’s not that they haven’t monetized effectively, but rather that there are gatekeepers in the way with no real competition, who can steal your margin by showing part of your news story. All of this is really a classic problem of anti-trust, and what a monopoly is today is different from the past but we haven’t acknowledged this properly in my view.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      If that's true (and I agree that it is), then charging for links is going to make it even worse and effectively cement that reality for all time. How is a startup who can't afford to pay employees, let alone publishers, supposed to come by and provide some alternative? Possibly perhaps, the big publishers (with deep pockets and lobbyists) really like this approach because despite entrenching big tech, it erects formidable barriers to entry for new upstart competitors to them? Regulatory capture is a tried and true tactic for industries that reach a certain size. IMHO society is a lot better off trying to prevent summarization efforts (that eliminate the need for the user to visit the page) than they are trying to charge for links. The latter is something that benefits everyone regardless of size. I'm not necessarily in favor of doing that either (would need to think it through a lot more, because it would essentially legislate a worse user experience, which is not something to be done without serious deliberation), but it seems like a much more relevant fight to have and one that isn't so self-serving.
Manuel_D 3y ago
Well, yeah it is a bad idea. Because if you tax links to your content Google will just stop linking to your content. Which is exactly what they're poised to do, as per TFA.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  If you want less of something, tax it.
  - giuseppe_petri 3y ago
    Or provide a better alternative. Less stick, more carrot.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  Or is this is all just bargaining and leverage before they make a deal, as they have elsewhere in the world

refulgentis 3y ago

I worked at Google until October 2023, the blog post is in bad faith. This is a good comment that gets at why[1], TL;DR: the hedge fund thing is a complete nonsequitur. The programs are the equivalent of Google Cloud grants, and Google actively disinvested from News[2] just because that was an easy place to get your mandated Sundar cuts for Wall Street. They're not a good steward of anything other than their stock price. I don't like the idea of a link tax but I do know, 100%, that blog post is slanted and mealy-mouthed on everything I know first-hand about. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40015572 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/technology/google-layoffs-work-culture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/technology/google-layoffs...

bevekspldnw 3y ago
The link tax is a red herring and a poor understanding on the part of legislators. The real issue is pre-adtech publishers kept 100% of ad revenue and double click now takes a massive cut (which they briefly touch on). All that cash flowing into MTV is real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away - it’s also the reason search is entering a utility collapse curve since AI can generate unlimited click bait. Double click will end up killing google, it’s already too late to go back.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Cheers -- I didn't know that. Interesting parallel to the 30% app store wars: people can argue till they're blue in the face with analogy after analogy, and I can easily talk myself into either perspective being obviously correct... ...at the end of the day, I'd be happy to see a tax pass, some mix of what you put excellently as "real people’s jobs and livelihood being drained away", and I imagine similar to you given your MTV reference, experiencing there wasn't really anything special going on at BigCo. It's plain old economic inefficiency, not poor beleaguered good guy G that's always looking out for news and just trying to organize the world's information.
  - bevekspldnw 3y ago

WalterBright 3y ago

We welcome all links to dlang.org! No fees!

burnte 3y ago

I actually agree with it too. Google and Facebook aren't the reason news outlets have cash problems and a free teat to latch on to isn't the answer. News is important, but let's fix the problem in a better way.

adrr 3y ago
What is the problem with news? Why aren't people willing to pay for it?
- imzadi 3y ago
  I don't think the issue is that people aren't willing to pay for it. The problem is, there aren't currently good options for paying for it. If I go to a news site and it is paywalled, I just leave. I am not going to subscribe to every single newspaper. If I could easily pay for today's paper (not an individual news story or a full subscription) without giving up all my persona info, I would probably buy 2 - 3 papers a day from various sources.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    $40/year for the WaPo and you can pay with PayPal or Apple. You don’t give them any more money than any other online vendor.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      That price point seems high. For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.
      - lupire 3y ago
        It is high because most people don't want to pay for a share of news. They'd rather watch TV, and not even the best TV. If you want the best, you need to pay for Max and Disney and Apple and Amazon and the rest.

abdullahkhalids 3y ago

Just to think about this more, are there any other business types, besides online news, where your success so radically depends on the decisions (read google news ranking and summarization algorithms) of some other business that you have zero relations with. Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in the economy? EDIT: the criteria of zero business relationship between your entire product class and the Big Business is critical; otherwise lots of examples exist.

jedberg 3y ago
Consumer reports (both the company and the category). A bad review can destroy a company. Yelp. TripAdvisor.
jedberg 3y ago
Any retail store. Like Costco and Walmart. They can break an entire company by just buying from a competitor.
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  There is a business relationship between Walmart/Costco and the product or a competitor of the product. In the Google News case, there is no business relation with any news site (Alphabet ads might have a relation with the news site, but that is not Google News).
  - lupire 3y ago
    Google News is a customer who walks into Walmart consumes the free samples and tells people about them. Walmart is free to ban Google from the premises (robots.txt) or to negotiate an exchange (monetization agreement).
- jacobgkau 3y ago
  I think they key is that in your example, Cosco/Walmart was "buying" from the company and is now "buying" from a competitor. Google's typically not "buying" from anyone when they choose who to list on their pages (only "selling" exposure, in cases of paid advertising).

Ferret7446 3y ago

> It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing Does it? If I summarize a book, do I need to pay a fee? News (much like recipes) is not directly covered by copyright (facts cannot be copyrighted). Only the expression (exact wording) is (which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story).

jacobgkau 3y ago
Legality aside, I can understand how reading a short news article (especially when paying only via ad views) and then summarizing information that lots of people are probably interested in right at this moment is likely to be more detrimental to a writer's business model than reading an entire book (possibly after purchasing a copy) and then summarizing information that's likely to be less timely.
account42 3y ago
> which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story I see this claimed often but it doesn't make any sense - anyone can still copy the recipe without the story and then the copy would even provide more value than the original. Seems to me padding recipes with fluff is mostly about SEO and maximizing ad impressions.

cush 3y ago

Google has single-handely ruined the internet, and absolutely warped our expectations around what the economics of content creation looks like online. Google earns money from that content. Why wouldn’t the content creators be entitled to a cut?

account42 3y ago
Oh please, most content online was shared freely long before google came along. On the contrary, it's the for-profit content creators and to a much bigger extend the monetizing platforms that have latched on to the open web and are now trying to redefine it. Meanwhile, most content is still created by users like you and me who are not going to get any of the ad profits these platforms are crying about.
- cush 3y ago
  Oh please, what? There’s nothing wrong or malicious or un-open with running a business by selling content online. You’re deeply confusing open and free. A marketplace built on open standards is still open. Google has been at the helm of the web for at least 15 years. “Before Google came along” was before the consolidation of the internet. Google consolidated the internet behind Search, their browser, SEO, even Amp pages (remember that dumpster fire? So open, right?), as they slowly tolled more and more of the internet, while keeping traffic flowing to their advertisers. Content creators are entitled to a cut of the profits that Google makes from selling ads while presenting their content. I hope this law passes and every other state follows suit.