Newspapers To Bid For Antitrust Exemption To Tackle Google and Facebook (cnbc.com) 116
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The news industry is to band together to seek a limited antitrust exemption from Congress in an effort to fend off growing competition from Facebook and Google. Traditional competitors including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, as well as a host of smaller print and online publications, will temporarily set aside their differences this week and appeal to federal lawmakers to let them negotiate collectively with the technology giants to safeguard the industry. Antitrust laws traditionally prevent companies from forming such an alliance which could see them becoming over-dominant in a particular sector. However, the media companies will be hoping that Congress will look favorably on a temporary exemption, particularly giving the recent clampdown on the technology industry which saw Google slapped with a $2.7 billion antitrust fine. The campaign is led by newspaper industry trade group News Media Alliance and it is intended to help the industry collaborate in order to regain market share from Facebook and Google, which have been swooping in on newspapers' distribution and advertising revenues. The two companies currently command 70 percent of the $73 billion digital advertising industry in the U.S., according to new research from the Pew Research Centre. Meanwhile, U.S. newspaper ad revenue in 2016 was $18 billion from $50 billion a decade ago.
Better idea: punish Facebook and Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
Allowing an excemption to antitrust rules is dangerous and stupid. If you have a problem with a powerful established competitor that is abusing a market dominant position, then seek antitrust against them. Dont abuse antitrust yourself.
But hey, maybe they know something the rest of us dont-- like how absurd it is to expect the congress cronies to actually give teeth to the laws on the books.
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Re:Better idea: punish Facebook and Google. (Score:4, Insightful)
Arguably, the newspapers are more monopolies than the tech companies. If you want major newspaper that covers Washington, and national news you have the WaPO to choose from, the NYT isn't really a substitute.
On the other hand if you don't like Google, there is Bing, and its an almost perfectly like substitute. If you don't like facebook there are a number of other conversation platforms like Disqus. While not perfect replacements they are social media alternatives.
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I'd argue that Disqus is at least as bad a substitute for Facebook as the NY Times is for the WaPO.
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Thing is, Disqus is a commenting system like spot.im, neither one demands your real name and then ban you if you refuse to hand them your passport or personally identifiable information. Neither one has their own curated news feeds and "feed-in" partnerships. There really isn't an alternative to facebook, nor is there a real alternative to google. Remember that microsoft was slapped with antitrust laws for including it's own web browser, and Intel was slapped with antitrust laws for engaging in unfair ma
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Whether or not Google is a monopoly is besides the point - the answer to a monopoly is not "more monopoly", the answer is to enforce anti-trust laws. We can discuss whether or not to take action against Google/Facebook/etc, but that action shouldn't be to create an even more powerful monopoly to take them on. We don't need that; we already have it - it's called the government.
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Congratulations, that's the result of decades of policies and political pressures aimed at net neutrality: when you force ISPs to be simple pipes and encourage business models based on advertising instead of subscriptions, that's the kind of winner-take-all market you en
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What are viable alternatives to search? What are viable social networking alternatives? What's a viable mobile OS platform? What's a viable advertising platform?
It took you a while but you actually eventually stumbled on the one thing they do have a monopoly in. ... Advertising.
The rest as far as they are concerned they have a lot of market power, but they are not monopolies in the first three you mention.
Mind you being a monopoly in an of itself is not bad, and being a monopoly is also not illegal either. It is what you do with the market dominant position that counts.
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They're not monopolies? What are viable alternatives to search? What are viable social networking alternatives?
There are PLENTY. Monopoly is NOT a synonym for market penetration, Or the vast majority of the population going with product X: if some product Y exists and would solve the same basic problem as product X, then it is a competing option, and if a competing option exists, then X is not a monopoly. Google might have 95% people using it, and the alternatives not as popular as Google, and
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Vivaldi, Opera, Mozilla instead of Chrome
Duck Duck Go, Dogpile, Yahoo instead of Google
Outlook, Zoho instead of gMail
Zoho has an interesting and useful office suite as well
I'm not saying to eliminate Google - but slowly, surely, incorporate other platforms - especially if you're concerned about monopolistic practices
Re:Better idea: punish Facebook and Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case I think the news industry needs to put on their big boy pants and realize that nothing guarantees them that they can keep making profits on an old business model forever. It seems that any industry that gets entrenched (music, news, lots more examples) thinks that they then should have a right to keep profiting even if society or technology, etc. moves on. In this case, adapt or die. It seems ingrained that we always attempt to protect ourselves. I imagine when my company is pushed out by newer stuff / better stuff I will probably be the same way - "there outta be a law!". But from outside it seems silly to think that the current news industry should have a legal recourse to continue an old school profit train.
Well put.
How many other industries have been turned upside down due to new technology coming along to supplant it. I'm sure the wagon wheel makers would like to put a stop to the automobile, not to mention the stagecoach makers, and horse breeders. Oh, and the buggy whip makers. Typewriter manufacturers and repair men would like to put a stop to those newfangled computers too. Not to mention adding machine makers, who are in hot water with abacus builders. And the vacuum tube producers want to put a stop to transistors as well.
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Yep...the BEST stereos still glow...
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ALL amps distort...the trick is to get one that distorts that is in a manner pleasing to the ear, with proper harmonics, etc...
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SS amps *have* come a long way these days...but you really gotta find a good one.
And a lot of this is subjective. To my ear, nothing beats a quality tube amp running through some large, horn loaded speakers (Klipschorns [klipsch.com]).
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If you want distortion for aesthetic reasons, the proper time to do that is while recording/producing the music. For example, with a guitar amp. Then your recording has the desired aesthetic baked-in. If your music doesn't sound good without extra post-processing (via tube stereo), it wasn't recorded right.
Also when you abandon tubes, you get to hear undistorted music in context
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Except for vacuum tube mfgrs, theres still a demand for those. Marshall, Mesa-Boogie, Engl, Soldano, Crate, Peavey, and a whole host of other amp makers as an example :)
Yes, there are still some very specialized demand for them. But nothing like there is for transistors, or even like there was for vacuum tubes prior to the advent of the transistor.
I sold my Mesa-Boogie stack many years ago as I stopped playing in bands and have been kicking myself ever since. I loved the sound of that thing.
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As usual, when someone brings up buggy whip manufacturers they have completely missed the point.
Almost ALL of the news provided by Google and Facebook comes from the traditional news organizations (the ones you would like to claim are obsolete). The only thing 'new' is that some very large companies (google and facebook) have inserted themselves between the news organizations and their customers, and those companies keep most of the revenue generated by the news organzations work. That is not even remotel
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The only thing 'new' is that some very large companies (google and facebook) have inserted themselves between the news organizations and their customers, and those companies keep most of the revenue generated by the news organzations work.
First: Google and Facebook didn't "insert themselves". They made products, and people have chosen to use those products.
Second and more important: "keep most of the revenue". What revenue does Google make from Google News? You click on a story and then read that story on the news site, with ads placed by the news organization. (I don't use Facebook; do they also just link to the story or do they post the whole story on Facebook?)
The problem is that nobody is buying news (paper, magazine, whatever) sub
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Except, as far as news gathering goes, Google and Facebook's business model seems to be to use the content generated by these dinosaurs to keep people from venturing out of their (G's and F's) revenue-generating ecosystems. Yes, when you actually open an article from within Google or Facebook, you open the newspaper's site - and the paper gets to sell ads based on that. But the back button takes you back to Google or Facebook.
It's not only about profit. It's about the revenue stream required to support s
Re: Better idea: punish Facebook and Google. (Score:2)
What else do you think the back button should do? If the media dinosaurs think that's a problem, maybe they should work harder and/or smarter to convince people that links on their pages are worth clicking. When it's hard to tell what tries to be real news from paid content, clickbait ads, and malware, they shouldn't be surprised when people leave their site so quickly.
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No, this is pretty much just communism in its murkiest still-identifiable form.
Essentially, Facebook and Google deliver information. People on Facebook need stuff to talk about, so they talk about common interests. This includes ... news. Google, of course, can connect anything you're asking about to the news that's probably why you're asking about it.
Now the newspapers aren't hot items anymore. People aren't buying newspapers, just like they're not buying physical CDs. In a generation, newspapers
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I think the UK is experiencing the same thing. This is why the government is in such a mess. The Eton educated, racist buffoons with their minority government currently havent got a clue what to do about it since their whole existence is founded on deceit and lies. Its harder for them to continue when people are able to do their own research instead of being spoonfed by the mainstream media.
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Newspapers are surprisingly full of bullshit, too.
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The problem is that the 'news' that Facebook and Google are 'providing' still comes largely from the newspapers. Neither Facebook nor Google actually gather and writes news. The only thing Facebook and Google are providing is ACCESS to the newspapers work, and Facebook and Google keep all the revenues from that work.
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Did you read the article. it's not about the newspapers asking the Government to try to shore them up. It's about asking the government not to treat their own efforts to adapt to online news aggregation as illegal collusion under anti-trust law.
They've accepted that people aren't buying newspapers any more - that's not the issue. They know that people are still consuming news, and they're actively moving their businesses online to where the people are. But various aspects of how Google and Facebook pres
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To sum it up, some news organizations still care about journalistic integrity and Facebook doesn't. People are too stupid to know the difference, so that is what the fight is over.
"We need an anti-trust exemption to fight for journalistic integrity!" - CNN
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Industry groups work together to develop solutions to problems all the time.
The "Fake News" part of this is a red herring. There's lots of bullshit news. There's lots of bullshit news in print newspapers. There's lots of bullshit news on Fortune, Forbes, and WSJ. More to the point, that's not really what they care about; their entire argument is that their businesses are failing and they need to somehow keep themselves relevant, bullshit news or none.
What you describe suggests everyone wants to read
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They also need to figure out how to prevent the summaries of their articles from being so detailed that people don't click on them.
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CNN, et. al. could start by not making it so hard to distinguish between real and fake news themselves.
Seriously, if those newspapers didn't consistently present such a distorted caricature of the people they oppose, while giving a pass on corruption to those they agree with, people wouldn't even look for a different source in the likes of Facebook.
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This is quite wrong. Newspapers want to be able to negotiate, as a group, with Google/Facebook for how their content can be used by those two agencies. It's the exact opposite of trying to cut down on online news - they want to be compensated for their online news.
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So, the newspapers aren't asking for any regulations to be changed or legal actions to be deferred particularly for the interest of their businesses?
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Well, they are asking to be able to negotiate as a cartel. That is a change to regulations. But they claim it's appropriate because they are negotiating with a different cartel (FB/Google).
I'm not sure why that would be considered controversial. Certainly, without anti-trust laws it would have happened already. And they make the point that anti-trust laws aren't relevant to the current situation.
Consider it akin to buggy-whip operators asking for changes in regulations on buggy-whip safety as their indu
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Except that is the issue, Google and Facebook are not abusing their positions against the rest of the news industry. The rest of the industry is pissed that google doesn't shove eyeballs at their pay-walled news sites. https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
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Re: Better idea: punish Facebook and Google. (Score:2)
Google put basically zero effort into the web content that they index and provide a search interface to. Yet Google makes money from as revenues related to those searches. Does that mean web site authors should get a "break-the-law" pass when it comes to dealing with Google?
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The old established media companies are nothing more than salacious rumour and opinion platforms lacking any credibility. The sooner newspapers such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and their ilk are banished the better for society.
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If things are going badly for a once absurdly ruthless and powerful industry, change the laws. It's the American way.
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Oh, I know why! Because that would be actual hard work! Then everyone would be able to see the actual value that big internet companies bring.
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But hey, maybe they know something the rest of us dont-- like how absurd it is to expect the congress cronies to actually give teeth to the laws on the books.
Even under the best of circumstances, bringing an antitrust suit against FB and Google will take 5-10 years. See, for example Microsoft in the 1990-2000s and Google in Europe in the early 2010s to Present. This option will likely move a lot faster.
The funny thing is. . . (Score:1)
Google and Facebook get their news from these companies. All they're doing is redistributing the work someone else did and making money off it.
It would seem these folks should be paying the news companies for all this work which they themselves don't have to do.
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These news organizations simply don't like the world that the 21st century has become. One where pretty mu
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In other words, if you're not spoon-fed whatever pablum someone else decides to hand out, you won't seek out real food?
That just screams the typical, lazy American.
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A system (Google) that algorithmically scans and collates all the sites offering to 'spoon feed' you information is the _opposite_ of 'spoon feeding' you.
If you get your information from an 'internet echo chamber', then it's no better than getting all your information from one media source.
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It is literally links to news articles from newpapers, cable news web sites, and so on... without a filter.
THATS WHAT A NEWS AGGREGATOR DOES
Another idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Newspapers still provide an important and valuable service to our society. They should be paid for it. Companies like Google and Facebook shouldn't be harvesting content for free. Setup a licensing deal with Google, Facebook, and any other meta-news distributors. Newspapers get money, and they continue to provide their services.
They should realize by now that the paradigm has shifted. People are consuming news content in new ways, and the best thing to do is adapt. Music's new distribution is streaming. News should be the same.
Re:Another idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
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"They should be paid for it"
Wrong they should be paid for it if there is a market for it. If nobody wants a paper, than they should NOT be paid for it. If they don't want their content harvested they should put it behind a pay wall or not put it online at all. If the paywall means Google does not index them and put them near the top of the search ratings to friggin bad.
Ultimately Google will be hurt if they don't index the content and return the results people want. On the other hand maybe it will turn
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The problem with that is people only look at the summaries than. How often do people read the linked articles here. Its hard to summarize and article that does not exist though. You have to do the research sometime.
The real problem is the media companies are their own worst enemy. I am not sure what the answer is, but the problem is the fist news organization to do the needful and fully paywall will die. People will flock to the guys that are still 'free' and they will get all the readership. They mig
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I think thats a small and simple view of it. I guess Major Print Coalition(or whatever they could be called) is really really scared that at some point, Google or Facebook will look at them, and realize they source to Reuters or other such companies, and might attempt to kill them as middlemen.
Or they are scared that the decline in quality will eventually threaten their income for Physical papers, because it will kill of quite a bit of print and knowledge.
Not that anybody should really care, but USA is a hu
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Companies like Google and Facebook shouldn't be harvesting content for free.
Oh they are harvesting content? Based on what I saw they only provide snippets of the headlines and links to content.
Really I wonder if maybe the media companies shouldn't be getting this for free. Heck just de-list them. That will make it all better.
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Newspapers still provide an important and valuable service to our society.
The market is already quantifying just how valuable the newspapers' services are.
If nobody's buying them or giving them any money then in what sense can you say that they're valuable to society?
Note: you may find them valuable, but you are not society.
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Major fast food restaurants want to regulate and sue the roads and highways for providing their customers easy access to the competition while not compensating the major fast food restaurants for existing on those roads and highways.
You laugh but they did that in my home town (Score:2)
The local fast food joints bought off the city council to squash it. See, if you're in traffic for 2 hours every day you're that much more likely to stop for Mickey D's or Burger King on the way home. The got caught and absolutely nothing came of it (besides the aforementioned traffic delays).
You'd be surprised how much corruption t
Why are they worried? (Score:3)
Someone still sells buggy whips.
Competitors, and yet....... (Score:2)
Screw them (Score:1)
Outdated, outmoded, poorly written garbage.
There is a term that describes this... (Score:2)
Rent Seeking.
That alone recommends against this and its advocates.
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I'm not sure how newspapers are rent-seeking. You probably mean another term. If anything, Google/Facebook are rent seekers in this situation..
Re: There is a term that describes this... (Score:2)
Watch. These always become rent-seeking, after they go through the attempt to out muscle. The media will attempt to form a sanctioned monopoly...
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Ah, gotcha. You're not actually talking about anything currently happening, nor responding to my claim that it's Google/Facebook who are rent seeking. You've just constructed a slippery slope future you want to condemn.
Re: There is a term that describes this... (Score:2)
Every one involved wants the same thing. Now or later, it will be the same.
we have this backwards (Score:1)
we need to break up Amazon and Google and possibly Facebook. If we had a competent and functional antitrust division at DOJ this would be happening.
It is not a trump thing, it is a crony politicians of both parties for decades thing. we need to smash these tech companies to bits like they did with Ma Bell.
NY Times, Wash Post, CNN, etc Are Like Pravda (Score:1)
Pravda-like news organizations seeking antitrust exemption. That's rich. What's next? Comcast, AT&T, Charter, etc cable companies seeking the same due to being threatened by on-line streaming and cord-cutting.
On a related note, Google News recent changes seem to suggest something is happening behind the scenes between Google and major news organizations. In my view, it's no accident the reduced content density necessitating excessive scrolling, lack of introduction text from articles, and lack of supple
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Have you been asleep for the last two decades? I certainly _won't_ get reliable information from the 'newspapers' or the 'MSM'.
That's what the newspapers are really complaining about. Wah, they're fact checking us! Wah, make them stop. Wah, journalists need to be licenced. Wah, their making their stories about our open bias.
Newspapers need to 'get by' with online ad revenue. Everybody else can, they can too, the sooner they get to it, the sooner it gets done.
Too big to fail. (Score:1)
That is why (Score:1)
Google totally f***d up Google News UI recently.
[I'm running the windows phone 8 user-agent patch but I fear it won't last long]
let's not forget (Score:3)
Washington Post: privately purchased by Bezos, one of the richest people in the world, politically active and advancing his political views and preferences through the media. Bezos also owns a company that completely dominates online shopping.
NYT: top shareholder is Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire with strong opinions on US politics, a major beneficiary from illegal immigration to the US, and a major Clinton supporter.
Bezos, WaPo, and the NYT symbolize what's wrong in American politics according to Democrats and progressives: foreign collusion, corruption of the political process by billionaires, and crony capitalism. And it's Democrats themselves that support these pricks.
FUCK YOU! (Score:2)
You mean all the Russia bullshit stories you have been running only to have to retract them!
Let's not forget the ever popular WMDs and the Iraq War cheerleading...yeah real reputable.
Fair Playing Field (Score:2)
The newspapers want to negotiate with Google and Facebook but they can't. There is an imbalance in power because there are many newspapers and only two companies they can get advertising money from. If they don't band together it becomes a race to the bottom for them.
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Too Late (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the Mainstream Media have already enjoyed a monopoly on mindshare for a long time. The reality is that the mindshare is not only draining from the Mainstream Media, but also the Internet is cultivating independent journalism.
Independent journalism, unfettered by the fascist/propagandist/leftist narrative that went unchecked for so long, has all but completely obliterated that narrative and, therefore, the credibility of these Mainstream Media organizations.
So, this seems more like a cry from
They don't deserve it (Score:1)
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Re: Make Antitrust Go Away (Score:2)
It's that whole right to left thing. Messes with a right hand view of the world.