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Google EU News Technology

Google Considering Pulling News Service From Europe (bloomberg.com) 131

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Google is considering pulling its Google News service from Europe as regulators work toward a controversial copyright law. From a report: The European Union's Copyright Directive will give publishers the right to demand money from Alphabet, Facebook and other web platforms when fragments of their articles show up in news search results, or are shared by users. The law was supposed to be finalized this week but was delayed by disagreement among member states.

Google News might quit the continent in response to the directive, said Jennifer Bernal, Google's public policy manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The internet company has various options, and a decision to pull out would be based on a close reading of the rules and taken reluctantly, she said. "The council needs more time to reflect in order to reach a solid position" on the directive, said a representative of Romania, current head of the European Council, which represents the 28 member nations.
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Google Considering Pulling News Service From Europe More

Google Considering Pulling News Service From Europe

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  • Oh no (Score:4, Funny)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @05:03PM (#58003690) Homepage Journal
    Where will Europeans get their news from? Maybe Slashdot?

    • I can see blocking service from pinhead weasels like the EU. they don't want any accidental usage, shut 'em down. Google News is not free... it's ad-driven. and even use of a US trademark legally in an ad that might be otherwise registered in the EU, like, say, Budweiser, is cause for big-ass unrelated fines. fsck 'em.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Paxtez ( 948813 )

        It is worse than that. Google "loses" money on news.google.X.
        Generally they don't make any money it since there isn't ads on it (I just confirmed on stock IE). [Obviously they get user analytics, and maybe some sites may pay them for click-throughs] Which is why they are so quick to drop the whole product for a huge amount of people.

    • European news just consists of detailing fines on American companies anyway.

      Well, that and how Europe is destroying its own culture through its guilt-based immigration policies.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        You might want to take a leaf out of our book. In the US corporations shit on you and you can't do anything about it. We have laws to protect ourselves from your corporate masters.

        • Corporations provide virtually everything I want for a comfortable life. Iâ(TM)ll take some shit from them.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            You make it sound like if you stood up for yourself they would just stop providing the stuff you want. Have you been reading Ayn Rand by any chance?

            What do you imagine Europe is like? We can't buy stuff because the corporations decided a two year warranty was too much to ask and abandoned one of the biggest markets in the world?

    • Come on, Google.
      Your threat is really meaningless. Just do it. Bar all of Europe from all google services for two days prior to the vote.
      Or for ever, but google doesn't have the balls to do that.

    • Stop indexing European news sites, keep Google news running. Google keeps getting paid (add revenue) but doesn't have any local news sites demanding payment.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      EU news would basically die. Locked in to local publishers in a local news service and those news publishers not be able to publish beyond their own platform, effectively silences, as of course the rest of the world makes news globally available and smarter news providers realise a bit of their news on another site with a link, to their site, is what gets most people to their site. The EU corporate establishment just had some delusional idea, they everyone would be forced back to their local site for corpor

    • I'd like to see all the 'tech' companies exit the news business. Not just Google, but also Microsoft (both for Newsguard as well as their News app), Facebook and Twitter. Just leave it to the Huffposts, Buzzfeeds and Breitbarts to carry the news.

  • Link Tax? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by duke_cheetah2003 ( 862933 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @05:09PM (#58003720) Homepage

    I presume the fuss is over the supposed "hyper-link tax" which has to be one the most idiotic ideas I've come across in my adult life. This is not how the web is supposed to work. There is no way that paying one site to provide a link to site makes any sense in any rational being's mind.

    If there's going to be *ANY* exchange of cash for hyperlinks, it totally should be the opposite direction. Site A pays Site B to entice Site B to link to Site A's pages. Paid promotion of your content. This sort of makes sense, I can tolerate it at least. But Site A paying Site B for the "privilege" of linking to pages on Site B. STUPID BEYOND BELIEF.

    If anything shackles the internet in the EU, this is it right here. Proceed with caution, you're going to basically crack the internet's entire foundation of sharing information.

    • This "link tax" is about the same as saying: I have to pay an author of a book royalties if I suggest to others that they read it, perhaps quoting a passage or paragraph from that book in my effort to get you to read it.

      Does this make sense to anyone? Of course it doesn't. The world doesn't work like that.

      But in the magical fairy land of the EU, this is precise what they want to do. You pay the author if you even want to suggest others read the author's content. STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There's not eno

      • Re: Analogy Added (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        European leaders do not like the 21st century, so they're dragging the future kicking and screaming back into the past, the mid-20th century they're more comfortable with.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Mandrel ( 765308 )
        A book is not a good analogy for news. A snippet of news can give away the whole story. Not true for a book, unless the snippet is from the climax, twist, or last page.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      I would assume so too. In which case this is all potentially moot as no less than 11 states have rejected the amendments proposed by Romania and they're going back to the drawing board. Or maybe even shelving the idea because they'd need to water it down too much to be useful to overcome the opposition, according to some pundits. Hopefully the apparent sanity that resulted in the US not auto-extending copyright to prevent new works entering the public domain last year (Mickey's debut in Steamboat Willie

    • Re:Link Tax? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @05:43PM (#58003898)

      I presume the fuss is over the supposed "hyper-link tax" which has to be one the most idiotic ideas I've come across in my adult life.

      Why presume when you can actually find out? The article says:

      https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
      Google is considering pulling its Google News service from Europe as regulators work toward a controversial copyright law. The European Union’s Copyright Directive will give publishers the right to demand money from the Alphabet Inc. unit, Facebook Inc. and other web platforms when fragments of their articles show up in news search results, or are shared by users.

      The wikipedia page for the EU Copyright Directive explains:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      The proposal [includes...] exemptions for either copying an "insubstantial" part of a work ... The version of the directive voted on by European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs contained explicit exemptions for the act of hyperlinking and "legitimate private and non-commercial use of press publications by individual users"

      So it looks like this is specifically *not* about a "hyperlink tax", and either Google specifically wants to be copying substantial parts of a copyright work without paying the owners, or something more subtle is going on (and hence we can expect to see simplifications, distortions, and clickbait designed to inflame responses).

      • all those presumers must be the Democrat wanna bees (non members) who see a twitter post or CNN news video and pounce on it without watching it all and think s smiling stance is evil.

      • You would be surprised by what lawyers can do with subjective terms like "insubstantial".

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

          You would be surprised by what lawyers can do with subjective terms like "insubstantial".

          That's fair enough and seems likely. Maybe we should interpret this news story as instead saying: "Google views the current 'substantial' wording of the law as being too vague, and it makes them unable to assess their risk exposure in the EU. Their negotiators have been making this point to the EU legislators behind the scenes but that's a difficult process. They decided it was time to bring out their big negotiating guns by having a high-level publicly visible statement about turning off all of Google News

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            It boils down to if headlines and snippets of news are substantial enough to merit copyright protection and possible licencing.

            The news sites think they are, and their argument is not without merit. After all, if Google is making money from ads on a site that is nothing more than their headlines and snippets then it's difficult to argue that those headlines and snippets do not have substantial value. It also requires substantial resources to create them.

            Google's argument is that such aggregation is a net be

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Currently, most news articles aren't covered by copyright in Europe (depending on the country), since short texts are generally excluded and each text is judged on its own. Now the act of putting them together into a news paper will get them all copyright coverage. There is also a provision to prevent AI generated summaries based on data mining. Beyond that, most of the proposal consists of exclusions for the purpose of academic studies, and so on. Hyperlinking is only mentioned once, as not being included.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It is not a hyper-link tax. You can link all you want. What you cannot do anymore is scrape some of the content from the site, call it a quote, and present it on your own site without consent from the copyright owner.

  • One way or another... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by forkfail ( 228161 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @05:09PM (#58003722)

    ... the Powers That Be (tm) are intent on returning to single source fount of information.

    This whole internet thing threw a spanner in the works for a few years, but looks like it's being reigned in.

    Back to business as usual.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      All news will be provided by the ministry of truth.

    • but looks like it's being reigned in.

      "reined in". It's about horses, not kings....

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        In this particular case, the malapropism works just fine because of who is attempting to act. (Hint: they reign.)

  • Aren't most of the google servers the server news in the United states? I guess if they want to agrigate European news they will need to do it from a domain that says .us ? .

    Exactly how does EU copyright law apply to an american company? Can't they simply claim they are not doing business in the EU and that anyone accessing their site is importing content ?

    As a further thought is Google liable for content they provide if I obscure my location? ( incognito mode? )
    Or is the idea just that they are not allowed

  • Google news ist quite bad in Germany. Not all mayor media are listed. You still have to visit some media websites like "Frankfurter Allgemeine" separately.

    Health topic is very bad with just one outlet posting questionable news and spamming the news system by posting one story under several different titles.

    Keep going, nothing to see here...

    • Quite a bit lost, actually (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Quite a bit is lost, actually. The media is loosing credibility, and this accelerates their loss of credibility.

  • All your .eu are belong to yahoo now!

  • The law is a proposal which has been rejected so often that it entered the last and final chance a proposal gets in EU legislature. However the article here makes it sound like it was to be ratified this week. There was even a different article on /. about this a few days ago. https://slashdot.org/story/19/... [slashdot.org]
    Most likely the Parliament and Council would disagree again, won't find a compromise both are happy with and the proposal fails. Then it'd be off the tables for some time, because the Council most ce

  • duh (Score:4, Funny)

    by spongman ( 182339 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @05:29PM (#58003828)

    they should just shut it down for a few days and see how quickly all those news outlets complain to their MEPs about lost ad revenue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      90% of news sites in Brazil opted out, and they claim it resulted in a negligible drop in traffic. People are still going to want news, they will just get it directly if they can't use an aggregation site.

  • robots.txt (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @05:31PM (#58003838)

    If news companies don't want Google indexing their content, they should just say so in their robots.txt file. There's no reason for Google to completely abandon the EU, and there's no reason for content owners to complain that others are indexing their content when they have a perfectly functionality way of controlling whether or not the content is indexed.

    • Re:robots.txt (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @05:44PM (#58003908)
      Oh but that's just it: They don't want to get delisted from google news, that would cost them tons of traffic that they need. They just want to force Google to pay them for indexing and linking to them.

      • Exactly - they want their cake and eat it too. I wonder if Google News withdrawal means blocking access to google news from EU, or simply not indexing any EU sources but still allowing EU residents to be fed a steady stream of news from elsewhere in the world.

        • [They want to be indexed but not listed under 'news'] Exactly - they want their cake and eat it too.

          This is the sort of anti-US-company BS that Trump should and could take on if he were not so distracted by "scary brown people". There are a lot of annoying visa- and trade-related practices that a majority of Americans would stand behind; he could have become a popular "populist". Opportunity wasted.

          • Correction re: "There are a lot of annoying visa- and trade-related practices that a majority of Americans would stand behind..."

            Reworked version: There are a lot of annoying visa- and trade-related practices for which a majority of Americans would stand behind efforts to resolve.

            (It's still awkward. Possible mod-points for the best fixer suggestion...)

            I shall also add that even if such practices are arguably "fair" from Europe's standpoint, having somebody working to get better terms and deals would still

        • The EU can implement a firewall block to prevent access to Google news. They can also sieze the money that advertisers pay them to run adds (the point of having Google news run in the EU). They can also block Google from indexing anything in the EU.
    • i.e. Search engine crawlers should not index the site, unless the site owner explicitly allows it in the robots.txt file.

      I mean I completely understand why it's set up the way it is. Setting the robots.txt to disallow crawling doesn't actually disallow crawling. It's just that the services which respect the file won't crawl your site if you have it set to disallow them. Inverting it gives the false sense that unless you explicitly allow crawlers, it is somehow impossible for them to index your site.
      • If you put up a billboard in your front yard you should not complain that people read it. Publicly accessible websites are not private, Google doesn't NEED explicit permission to index it.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They do want to be indexed, but they don't want the text of the hyperlink to be a summary of the article - since that removes any reason the click the link. A perfectly reasonable wish. In the US, Google apparantly made some agreements with the news companies where they got some 'royalties' instead. That is because the news companies could leverage their copyright on the articles. In Europe, until now, in most countries, copyright would not be awarded to something as short as an article, so Google could jus

  • Block the whole of Google from Europe (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Along with all Android phones from Europe. See how long it takes for the EU to change it's tune.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      France will demand a new look flip phone be approved by a committee of experts.
      A new French phone for France that can fully support both voice and text services.
      Later updates will allow for video and images to be sent.
  • Put a token, few lines of free news on your approved EU nation "news" sites.
    When the users click, find, links all they get is the login in paywall.
    The branding is kept online.
    People can still find the magazine, newspaper brand online.
    The content has to be paid for. By the day, week, month, year.
    No new EU laws and taxes needed.

  • If Google, Bing, et. al. just stop serving the EU entirely rather than comply, I'm imagining people all over the continent shambling around outside in the rain and looking for that "library" their parents told them about so they can reacquaint themselves with encyclopedias and microfilmed copies of old newspapers whenever they need to look something up.

    Hopefully not all of those old libraries will have been converted into mosques by now.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • 2nd tier ones are dirt cheap. Then they can link to those as much as they want to.

    Maybe that is the plan. Pull out now, depress the market, and then buy.

  • They threaten to quit, without having the cost analysis of the new law? Who can believe the threat is serious?

  • ... put "User-agent: googlebot-news Disallow: /" into robots.txt.

    But no. What publishers want is the same amount of traffic and some extra monies... Well, they tried that in Spain, so Google just shut it down in Spain.

  • does google always have to pay all news sites that it links to or only those that want to be paid.
    if it's not mandatory i don't have an issue perce with link tax, it's up to the news provider to decide if they want less traffic to their site or not.

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