Google and Facebook 'Must Pay For News' From Which They Make Billions (yahoo.com) 168
Internet giants such as Google and Facebook must pay copyright charges for using news content on their platforms, nine European press agencies said. These giant platforms, news agencies said, make vast profits from news content on their platforms. The call comes at a time when the EU is debating a directive to make Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players pay for the millions of news articles they use or link to. From a report: "Facebook has become the biggest media in the world," the agencies said in a plea published in the French daily Le Monde. "Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom... They do not have journalists in Syria risking their lives, nor a bureau in Zimbabwe investigating Mugabe's departure, nor editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground." The agencies argued, "access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth."
Simple solution for Google & Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop linking to any news from the group(s) that don't want them "making billions" by linking news articles.
Wonder how long those news agencies will take to change their minds?
Re:Simple solution for Google & Facebook (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop linking to any news from the group(s) that don't want them "making billions" by linking news articles.
Wonder how long those news agencies will take to change their minds?
Therein lies the rub... Simple to link indexing terms of service to agreement to allow Google to provide links and first lines of text. Do news organizations really not want Google to link to them?
Re:Simple solution for Google & Facebook (Score:5, Informative)
Of course they want Google to link to them! They also want Google to give them billions and billions of dollars, because, you know, those links are utterly priceless!
Re: Simple solution for Google & Facebook (Score:3)
"News" should be paid for by the marketers and governments that are the ones most interested in getting it out there in the public eye. News doesn't usually serve the broader public interest or provide value to the readers. The value proposition is upside down.
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You are confusing advertisements and press releases with journalism.
Re: Simple solution for Google & Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
I appreciate good journalism. I also understand that 99% of what is out there isn't.
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^DING! Ding! Ding!
We have a winnah!
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37 journalists have died this year trying to bring you truths that government hides.
WTF have YOU done for anyone?
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I appreciate good journalism. I also understand that 99% of what is out there isn't.
That's because what you call journalism - isn't.
Remember, these are your words:
News" should be paid for by the marketers and governments that are the ones most interested in getting it out there in the public eye. News doesn't usually serve the broader public interest or provide value to the readers. The value proposition is upside down.
I.e. It should be strictly commercial.
It should be strictly "on a need to know basis" press releases by the government.
It offers no service to public.
It offers no value to readers.
The "value proposition is upside down" to you cause your perceptions are upside down from what journalism IS. [spj.org]
If you find that 99% of what you see is shit... there's a good chance that you're looking at the world from inside a cesspit.
OR... that you are
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There's a difference? I wish there was one, but it's not too apparent to me.
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but it's not too apparent to me.
Well... there's your problem right there.
Here's a starter...
Journalists ASK questions and SEEK answers in pursuit of FACTS and the TRUTH.
I'm guessing there's no need to explain what ads and press releases are.
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I'd be happy to read some journalism, if only the journalists could actually produce some...
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It doesn't seem that unreasonable to want to be paid for the content. Google needs it, they need revenue to keep producing it... It should be possible to find a mutually agreeable solution.
Re:Simple solution for Google & Facebook (Score:4, Interesting)
Many forums ask users not to "cut and paste" more than a few lines from a story and to provide a link to the original site. Otherwise that runs into copyright issues if users just summarize the whole article. That's the problem. If the original news site doesn't get clicks they don't get advertisers.
If an AI summarizes the article (Score:2)
as they will be able to do easily in the near future,
by understanding the meaning and then paraphrasing it using different sentence construction,
that is NOT copyright infringement, since it is not the meaning that copyright applies to, but the specific expression.
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Many forums ask users not to "cut and paste" more than a few lines from a story and to provide a link to the original site. Otherwise that runs into copyright issues if users just summarize the whole article. That's the problem. If the original news site doesn't get clicks they don't get advertisers.
Sure and Google has been pretty good about linking to the original articles and providing no more than the first line or headline. This ruling would seem to indicate that anyone linking to a news article (or any website) would owe the destination address some money. Unless this is just about the pictures... I could see that the pictures they use are a bit on the large size of thumbnail, but still I would think the news organizations would want the traffic. Sorry EU, looks like you won't be getting click
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There would be inevitable defectors on the news side. They _need_ traffic.
I'll grant that the good sources have an advantage. But that's 5% of the market that's even trying to be anything other than niche echo chamber? Very little of which is in France, where they like to be told what they want to hear.
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Other solution is for these agencies to pool funds together to create their own platform and then forbid the other ones from linking to their articles. In reality it only moves one almost monopolistic situation to another, but it gives them the freedom to fund it. If people like the new platform more than the old, happy days for them. Otherwise, they need to review their business model (and we lose the 4th branch of power)
Re:Simple solution for Google & Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. But isn't this was robots.txt [robotstxt.org] is for? Perhaps we need to update the RFC to indicate that the page(s) are okay for search results, but not okay for aggregators? Seems like a simple fix that doesn't involve lawyers.
Re:Simple solution for Google & Facebook (Score:5, Informative)
Right. But isn't this was robots.txt is for? Perhaps we need to update the RFC to indicate that the page(s) are okay for search results, but not okay for aggregators? Seems like a simple fix that doesn't involve lawyers.
Actually there is no need for that, google allows multiple ways to block or limit the search results these news organizations can display already. Google has their different crawlers listed [google.com] on their support pages and also provides examples of how to block specific crawlers from indexing their sites or limit what is displayed. In addition they also support blocking via meta tags and even http headers [google.com]. So if the news organizations wanted to show up in search results but not in google news they could easily set the following on the web server:
And just like that the news stories would not be indexed at all, or if they did not want snippets but just a normal link they could replace noindex with nosnippet and they would have blocked news snippets being shown site wide. With the solution to their woes being so simple I am not sure why they have not done it yet.
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With the solution to their woes being so simple I am not sure why they have not done it yet.
Because that does not solve their problem.
Their problem is that Google is not giving them money. Ergo the only possible solution is for Google to give them money.
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Wonder how long those news agencies will take to change their minds?
Historically, about a week.
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Stop linking to any news from the group(s) that don't want them "making billions" by linking news articles.
Wonder how long those news agencies will take to change their minds?
They'll just go to the government cap in hand asking for money. The spineless conservatives will simply give it to them and they'll never see what they did wrong.
If they were to put these companies under the same rules as the publicly funded BBC, I wouldn't have an issue, but if the likes of the Daily Mail, Express or Sun had to conform to the standards the BBC has to, the papers would go out of business in a week as all they'd be able to print is retractions for the incorrect stories printed yesterday.
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Interesting. On this side of the pond, it's the liberals who are all gung-ho about giving out government money when something doesn't work as it should. And the media (mostly) is pretty liberal here also (with a few notable exceptions, of course).
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Re: Simple solution for Google & Facebook (Score:2)
When google news came out, I immediately became a fan . Then it proved to be a total mess echo chamber without any way to find non-major propaganda stories.
Then I went back to CNN and BBC as my major news stories.
So not a tear was shed by me.
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Pay for shit you use... (Score:1, Redundant)
What a concept!
So then leave 'em high and dry (Score:5, Insightful)
Let those new outlets get their own clicks the hard way, instead of having FB and Google funnel people straight to them. Spoiler alert: I won't see their articles anymore.
Re:So then leave 'em high and dry (Score:5, Interesting)
Let those new outlets get their own clicks the hard way, instead of having FB and Google funnel people straight to them. Spoiler alert: I won't see their articles anymore.
Is it good for healthy societies to have one or two giant for-profit companies controlling most of the news people see? There are three forseeable outcomes-
1. The aggregator manipulates which stories are shown based on payments by the news organizations, or by 3rd parties
2. The aggregator tries to show the user exactly what they want to see, and hides articles they do not want to see
3. Combination of the above
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> Is it good for healthy societies to have one or two giant for-profit companies controlling most of the news people see?
It's not, but I thought we were talking about Google and Facebook?
Almost all media in the US is controlled by a handful of corporations, so if you think Google and Facebook having a hand in delivering just the online portion is a problem, you should probably sit down with a drink before reading this chart:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/50/78/5e/50785e25356a72df377e02287c90f8ed.png
6 Companies control the media (Score:2)
Is it good for healthy societies to have one or two giant for-profit companies controlling most of the news people see?
No but that's hardly some new problem. Currently there are about 6 companies" that control roughly 90% of the media. It is these companies that are funding opposition to net neutrality since they own much of the content and distribution. [businessinsider.com]
Google if anything is something of a disruptive influence.
Re:So then leave 'em high and dry (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect that like the piracy argument, your argument is based on the false assumption that if news aggregators didn't exist, these people would got their news from "better" services and be better informed. It's more likely that if these people weren't getting their news from Google News or Facebook, they wouldn't be getting any news at all. i.e. The problem isn't the aggregator, the problem is some people just don't actively seek out news.
I hit several news sites daily (including ones I dislike but feel I should browse just so I'm getting a complete picture). I also go through Google News in case there's something these "major" news sites are omitting, on the theory that a computerized algorithm will have less bias than a human editor at selecting which stories are important.
That's how I learned about 2 people dying and 57 people being hospitalized due to drug overdoses at a Florida music concert [wate.com] on June 1, 2016. That was the same day there was a murder-suicide at UCLA [wikipedia.org] which was all over the national news and even preempted regular broadcasts in Southern California for live news coverage. The drug story barely made it out of local news even though it had just as many deaths and far more injuries. Because most of the news organizations are biased against guns, to them a negative story about guns was more important than a bigger negative story about drugs. In this case, Google News was superior to the regular national news outlets.
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I don't see a problem with what the news agencies are asking. Google and FB just need to start charging the news agencies for all the traffic they send their way and pay them from this revenue.
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I don't see a problem with what the news agencies are asking. Google and FB just need to start charging the news agencies for all the traffic they send their way and pay them from this revenue.
Just a simple general rule change: All sources must pay a fee to appear in search results/FB feeds, the amount equal to whatever fees, payments, taxes, levies, etc that source charges Google/FB. If they charge zero to appear in search results/FB feeds, then the fee amount is is zero to appear in search results/FB feeds (our records show we have not received your payment. please remit your check for $0.00 lol). Simple and fair.
Strat
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Plus 10%. To handle the inevitable overhead....
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The same happens on news portals and they know it. But they wish you would read headers on their landing pages instead of google news.
Spain already had a legislators rule in favor of the newspapers against google. google's answer was to blacklist them. Google News To Shut Down In Spain [slashdot.org] Spanish Media Group Wants Gov't Help To Keep Google News In Spain [slashdot.org]
Wambulance (Score:4, Informative)
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And I agree that this is how it works in print. I think the sour grapes are that Google and FB are making 10x(?) more than the news agencies and they see all that money and want more for themselves.
Specifically "it's not fair" comes to mind.
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Re:Wambulance (Score:4, Interesting)
I may have been unclear...
I meant to imply the content (news) creators are thinking "It's not fair" that Google and FB is getting a bigger slice of the pie.
Thing is, FB and Google pour piles and piles of money into their infrastructure to actually handle the massive load that ultimately funneled users to the news sites, so I think they do deserve a rather big hunk of the pie...
where is this advertising revenue? (Score:2)
I don't see how Google makes any money off its news aggregation---they're doing it for free it seems.
They're making money in many other businesses but not news and the newspapers want some of it.
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Rule's always been: pay if you reprint. (See AP in the USA.). However, everyone's always been free to summarize and restate if they attribute, which is essentially what the link does.
In the USA and see where that has got you.
Before you start crying/shouting communist/socialist Europe, Europe sees things differently. They understand that you cannot have a healthy democracy without 1 : private money out of politics (and that's the reason most european countries have public financing laws for politics) and 2 : variety in newspapers. Which leads to the consequences that some or most of them are subsided by the taxpayer.
If google and facebook get the fuck out of the EU it won't matter (a lot
Welcome to Google's new AI-driven news service (Score:2)
>everyone's always been free to summarize and restate if they attribute
I imagine it wouldn't take Google long to hack together something that would not only gather news, but summarize it, tag it with an attribution, and then put 'GoogleNewsAI' in the byline.
Hell, they could probably manage to link it to a GIS to pull up a relevant licence-free image, too.
NOT a myth (Score:1)
"access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth."
Access to free information has been a great victory of the internet. It is not a myth. People expect money in return for what they give freely (bits landing on my computer). That's a myth.
Double edged sword if there ever was one (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's very true, but the solution will not be to try to force Google et al to pay for the news. Those guys don't really need the news, as most people are going to read whatever is put in front of them rather than go out of their way to find high quality news. As long as they can find something somewhat engaging to link to, that will be plenty good enough, so Googlebook will be willing to just cut off the press organizations if they need to (Google has done it before). Approaching them about some kind of
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News organizations make money on published journal sales and advertising. They are looking for a new revenue stream since the old method has been broken. They really need to look at why people stop reading. Hopefully some will start to realize opinion pieces loose more readership than well researched articles.
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Craigslist is killing newspapers. They used to make bank off classified ads. That's never coming back.
A lot of papers add _no_ value, (e.g. the McClatchy newspapers, the NY Times). They just repeat their sides talking points, reprint press releases and AP stories.
Content producers that do add value (e.g. Craigslist) have no reason to even be on dead tree anymore. People that used to get power by buying ink by the barrel are now just weighted down by ink bills, and they just don't get it. Think they are
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... then the only "news" most people will see will be cheap opinion pieces.
That seems to be the majority of the crap posted to Facebook now.
Paywall (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution already exists, and is already in use.
But don't double charge (Score:3)
If Google, Bing, FB and the rest are forced to pay for the news in the first place via their advertising dollars, then the link followed should always work and provide access to the complete text of the article they linked to. Drop the paywall for any reference from a search engine that has already paid for the content.
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That would make it pretty easy to always get free content; just fake the referrer header in the request for content. They would need some kind of shared token system in place and a piece of software running on all systems.
A perhaps naive question (Score:2)
When a site such as MSN carries a news story - the whole text from perhaps the AP under an MSN link are they not paying for it at all? IS there some sort of revenue sharing from whatever ads are served up?
I would think just copying their entire articles without permission would clearly violate copyright and would have been shut down long ago if that were the case.
OTOH, if they're just linking to stories with only a sentence or two in a preview that seems like fair use to my untrained layman's eye. And bes
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This is a bad idea (Score:2)
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Right now, I'd be happier if they'd up their ability to downrate sites that are misleading them with summaries that aren't visible to general web traffic.
I don't think... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't they understand how the internet works. The articles are not reprinted wholesale, only linked to. Facebook and Google make money as an aggregator, and then you go to the media's site and see the full article, and their advertising. Everyone advertises on their own platform.
As someone else noted, the American media largely understands how this works. The EU proposal is just some bizarre misguided rent seeking for the media industries there, which will end up blowing up in their own faces as they no longer receive the majority of their traffic.
Re:I don't think... (Score:4, Informative)
There is no EU proposal.
There is a bunch of media that want the EU to make a proposal.
Big difference!
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The EU proposal is just some bizarre misguided rent seeking for the media industries there
When they have to resort to hyperbole like:
access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth.
You know they don't have a good argument.
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Same argument applies to Torrent sites. They only link and don't host. .... funny that.
...easy... Charge the ISP !!! (Score:1)
Tried it before and it was bad. (Score:1)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]
I remember the French speaking ones trying before and when they closed the news sites down the publishers saw sharp decline in news.
They did this in 2015 (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com]
Belgium was the first country to try it, and Google responded by removing complaining publications from Google News. In response, the publications then complained that Google News was being mean to them, even though they were the ones complaining. In Germany, a similar thing happened, whereby Google left the complaining publications in Google News, but without snippets since that was a key aspect of the law. Again, the publishers screamed "unfair" even though they were the ones who had pushed for the law in the first place.
Re:They did this in 2015 (Score:5, Insightful)
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They want a "must carry" deal, like the public broadcasters have with regard to cable TV. If you operate a cable TV system in Germany, you have to carry the public TV and radio stations. The private media companies want something like that for their love-hate-relationship with Google. Wouldn't that be great? A wealthy company that is required by law to buy your product? Yeah, Google is sooner going to end news search in Europe before they'll agree to propping up the news agencies and companies.
What "editors"? (Score:4, Insightful)
FTS: "They do not have . . . editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground"
Given the quality and bias of news that is passed on to the public, neither do these 'news' agencies.
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> Given the quality and bias of news that is passed on to the public, neither do these 'news' agencies.
OK Donald. I thought you had other things to do today like give Ajit Pai the medal of freedom or something?
They tried in Spain (Score:1)
Anew law was passed and then Google news shut down and news agencies got 0.
Then, they immediately bitched that the law should have said "you cannot shut down and you must pay". So the mask fell off. It was not about fairness, just about greed after all.
Better not rock that boat too much... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom
Don't start giving them ideas...
On the other side, If they built a newsroom, no idea how much would that cost, but anyway if they did, and then they linked preferentially to that news source, the same outlets to complain now for being linked, would be crying illegal monopoly at the top of their lungs, and demanding to be linked on equal standing.
I guess that the main lesson here is that seismic technological transitions always have somebody with the foot in the wrong place.
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Piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Useless whinning from dying dinossaurs.
I'm not completely unsympathetic to what they are saying, but the perspective is all wrong, and it's not all that dissimilar than the whole discussion about piracy. Pointing fingers at all the wrong places will lead you to no results.
See, no matter how much you cry about this, Facebook, Twitter and Google are not "stealing your content" themselves. It's the users. And no matter how hard you try, there are provisions in law that protects these platforms from their users actions. This won't change because there are far bigger things in play here than your news rooms financial needs.
There's no viable route where one of these social networks giants will say "fine, we'll pay you some ammount of money because people who uses our platforms keeps sharing your content".
Because if they open that Pandora's box, they'll also be taking responsibility for all the crap that is shared there. That's a whole other level of responsibility and liability that will be thrown against the companies to a point they won't be able to keep profitability anymore.
And do you really want to tie yourselves as employees of these corporations?
But much like piracy, the solution should be relatively easy to understand: you want your content to be monetized, you want to be compensated for it, you want a viable solution where your work is paid for - look at content creators that are not still living in the past.
What do YouTubers do? What newer platforms do? How are modern newsrooms sustaining themselves? How can you still make a profit when people are accessing your content without traditional methods of payment?
The answer is there.
These press agencies have got to stop displaying such an incredible ammount of ignorance about the platforms they are trying to get a foothold on, and hire people who can come up with ways of monetizing their content on web platforms. It isn't a secret, and it's pretty much everywhere these days.
I'm sorry if the Internet has changed the funding dynamics of traditional news, entertainment industry in general, and other stuff - but face reality and fall in. This whinning will result in nothing.
YouTube demonetization (Score:2)
What do YouTubers do?
Until recently, they used to have YouTube place preroll ads on their videos. But that's less effective now that YouTube is enforcing stricter standards on what material in videos is "advertiser friendly".
They're right. Media steals from each other (Score:2)
Slashdot is the worst of them all! (Score:4, Funny)
Google and Facebook don't publish or sell news. (Score:3)
To my knowledge, there is no way to read a news article on either google or facebook. They link to the actual site where the news article exists. If anything, the news site should be paying google and facebook for giving the newspaper free advertisement. If they demand that google and facebook not link to them then they will just lose the free advertisement that google provides. There is nothing that prevents the newspapers from getting together and creating a better portal than news.google.com but that's all google does. The fact that google has a defacto monopoly and many people only read the summaries and not the actual article might be a problem but not really google's problem. The only two remedies that are likely to happen is either google delists your site or google stops displaying summaries of your article which is basically the same as delisting it.
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To my knowledge, there is no way to read a news article on either google or facebook.
Google operates a caching CDN for pages using the stripped-down AMP dialect of HTML, and it places AMP pages higher in search results.
They should be careful (Score:1)
They are just begging for the Google and Facebook monopolies to put them out of business. All Google and Facebook have to do is threaten to open up massive news operations with field reporters for a community news portals on their site for each city and country (without aggregated links from outsides news agencies).
If they did that it would be the end up these European press agencies. They should be thankful that these platform aggregate their links in this day and age.
Haven't we been here before? (Score:5)
I mean, didn't they try this years ago and google stopped listing them. Their traffice went down and they begged to get re-listed?
Oh here one for starters:
http://www.france24.com/en/201... [france24.com]
I like this idea (Score:2, Insightful)
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Net neutrality loss ... (Score:3)
... may take care of this.
Limiting access works many ways.
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One, despite what many in the US (and even the US government) seem to believe, the EU is not actually part of the US.
Two, none of the parties here are ISPs.
So, no, what the US does about net neutrality is completely irrelevant here.
Just Assume All FB News is Fake (Score:1)
I assume any and all news I find on Facebook to be fake unless proven otherwise.
In other words... I don't get my news from Facebook.
Dear Pres Agencies (Score:2)
Please bring me free dinner oh and yes, you must pay me for the privilege.
Fair's Fair (Score:1)
Democracies and newspapers. (Score:1)
We need to find a way to fund them collectively. If not, trolls will own the elections.
Google and Facebook are effectively monopolies. Might as well formally recognize that status and use the monopoly regulation tools to find some sort of funding to the news papers. It is not a great solution, not even a good solution. But it is still better than the alternative, direct government subsidy from tax payers.
If I could turn off facebook news items... (Score:2)
Silicon valley should start own news (Score:1)
I wonder... (Score:2)
That's some nice internet traffic you've got there (Score:2)
Be a shame if something was to happen to it....
Good journalism isn't free (Score:2)
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