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Google Links The Internet News

Google Vows To Stop Linking To New Zealand News If Forced To Pay For Content (apnews.com) 68

Posted by BeauHD from the corporate-threats dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Google said Friday it will stop linking to New Zealand news content and will reverse its support of local media outlets if the government passes a law forcing tech companies to pay for articles displayed on their platforms. The vow to sever Google traffic to New Zealand news sites -- made in a blog post by the search giant on Friday -- echoes strategies the firm deployed as Australia and Canada prepared to enact similar laws in recent years. It followed a surprise announcement by New Zealand's government in July that lawmakers would advance a bill forcing tech platforms to strike deals for sharing revenue generated from news content with the media outlets producing it.

The government, led by center-right National, had opposed the law in 2023 when introduced by the previous administration. But the loss of more than 200 newsroom jobs earlier this year -- in a national media industry that totaled 1,600 reporters at the 2018 census and has likely shrunk since -- prompted the current government to reconsider forcing tech companies to pay publishers for displaying content. The law aims to stanch the flow offshore of advertising revenue derived from New Zealand news products. If the media law passes, Google New Zealand Country Director Caroline Rainsford said the firm would need to change its involvement in the country. "Specifically, we'd be forced to stop linking to news content on Google Search, Google News, or Discover surfaces in New Zealand and discontinue our current commercial agreements and ecosystem support with New Zealand news publishers."

Google's licensing program in New Zealand contributed "millions of dollars per year to almost 50 local publications," she added.
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Google Vows To Stop Linking To New Zealand News If Forced To Pay For Content More

Google Vows To Stop Linking To New Zealand News If Forced To Pay For Content

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  • Google dimwit Caroline Rainsford said:

    "Specifically, we'd be forced to stop linking to news content on Google Search, Google News, or Discover surfaces in New Zealand and discontinue our current commercial agreements and ecosystem support with New Zealand news publishers"

    No, dimwit, you'd be "forc[ed] to pay for articles [created by New Zealand news publishers] displayed on [your platform]". You call yourself a "director"!?!

    • They are unwilling to pay and thus a law requiring them to pay would force them to stop.

      What she said was true... from a certain point of view.

    • Re:Lies, all lies from Google (or: Yeah ok, "Eric" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Friday October 04, 2024 @07:06PM (#64840871) Homepage Journal

      Facebook is trying this crap in Canada, eh. no problem tho bro, Canadians just don't use Facebook much anymore. most of my facebook friends have branched out and or migrated to other platforms. besides facebook is getting more spammy with each passing day, some groups are ok but the ads are all manipulative and unethical

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

      No, that's not an option for them.

      If this passes, there is a specific action they would be forced to take by their own internal pressures, not the external ones.

      So this law forces them to withdraw.

  • If they believe Google is bad for business (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday October 04, 2024 @06:34PM (#64840789)
    If these companies believe that Google is bad for business they can just edit their robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling their website and linking to their content and stealing their precious revenue. Of course that's not what they really want, which is to force Google to pay them and to force them to link their content so they have no choice but to pay them. More rent seeking behavior! Just what the Internet needs.

    • Google has market dominance in search. The reason companies can't just turn off indexing is because it's economic suicide because of that market dominance.

      Now, it's not illegal to have a monopoly, but it is illegal (at least in theory but basically not in practice any more thanks to chucklefucks like you) to use that monopoly position in one market (search) to leverage position in another market (advertising). Guess who is also market dominant in online advertising, who get paid for the ad impressions for s

      • Re: If they believe Google is bad for business (Score:5, Insightful)

        by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Friday October 04, 2024 @07:03PM (#64840859)
        Let them index the main page so your website still shows up, but don't let them link to specific articles. It's not that hard. But like I said it's just companies thinking they deserve to get paid. Let companies that can't figure out how to make money die so that they can be replaced by others that can instead of mandating everyone else prop up ones that no one wants to give money to.

        Google abusing a monopoly position is a different matter entirely and trying to tangle it up with this just makes for more of a mess. If you make Google pay those companies Incan guarantee you that all you've done is cement any monopoly position they have because none of their smaller competitors would be able to afford those payments.

        • "is another matter entirely"

          *facepalm*

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by SirSlud ( 67381 )

          The amount of traffic websites get from people visiting the main page is basically zilch. The overwhelming majority of traffic comes from deeplinking, which comes from searching for articles and sharing content (eg: Google/Meta). Google and Meta both make money by taking some of that deeplink content, which keeps users on their property, making them money using content they did not produce. Companies can't afford to tell Google and Meta because Google and Meta are effectively the only game in town for peopl

      • monopoly position in one market (search)

        Search isn't a market, though. A market requires buyers and sellers, and there aren't any of either. Search services are offered for free, and users pay nothing for them.

        Search is just a way to draw traffic for ads. The same is true of (non-paywalled) news and similar content. The fact is that search and news sites are in the same market -- providing surface for advertising, and drawing eyeballs to those ads. They're competitors... and also cooperators. Search benefits from including news in the results because it makes search more useful, and news sites benefit from being included in search results because it drives traffic to them.

        But if the law forces search engines to pay more to the news sites than the value the search engines get from including news in the results, then obviously the search engines will stop including them. Likewise, if the news sites believe the search engine is not giving them value, they should opt out -- which they can easily do via robots.txt configurations.

        Guess who is also market dominant in online advertising, who get paid for the ad impressions for serving copy and photos written and produced by news organizations?

        Yes, this is true, but the news organizations aren't alleging that Google's ad network is somehow not working for them, or that the fact that the search engine comes from the same company as the ad network is somehow unfair. This part of your argument is a red herring.

        Most people do not click through, being sated by the "value" of the summary previews

        This seems actually related to the complaint, it may be the core of the complaint, but it seems to me that the appropriate remedy for that problem is to tell search engines to stop showing summaries, rather than requiring them to pay to link.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by SirSlud ( 67381 )

          Search isn't a market, though. A market requires buyers and sellers, and there aren't any of either. Search services are offered for free, and users pay nothing for them.

          yikes, disagree. markets that are primarily ad revenue driven are not in the same market just because they're both primarily ad revenue driven. that's .. uh a fucked up view of markets unless you subscribe to a viewpoint that markets are not about what is produced, but rather how they are funded. People *buy* things - seemingly for free - b

      • I agree with the OP, this is a problem that robots.txt was meant to solve. While Google does take a small portion of bandwidth to crawl the website, you get visibility in return. There is no payment for the "content" as it is freely available for anyone to read. This is completely contradictory to the internet and news publications have survived for many years with RSS feeds and search engines. Aaron Swartz would be rolling over in his grave if he saw this, as he helped write the RSS spec (1.0 or 2.0, I don

        • People are BOYCOTTING THEM because they are WOKE and CORRUPT and DELUSIONAL.

          You were providing somewhat reasonable arguments until you couldn't help but go conspiracy theorizing in all-out right-wing-nutjob mode. Turns out that seeming reasonableness was mere rationalization then. Too bad.

    • Re:If they believe Google is bad for business (Score:5, Interesting)

      by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Friday October 04, 2024 @07:03PM (#64840861)

      The original promise of search engines like Google is that if you let Google index, people will search for pages and that will give you traffic. It's a win-win and they are happy with that part. What they don't agree with is Google having a "Google News" homepage where they post an image and enough of the summary such that there no traffic is sent. This mode is parasitic.

      There isn't a robots.txt option to accept one and not the other. Google says that they will delist the entire websites, which isn't what the news outlets are asking for, and isn't even in the interest of Google (since Google makes profits from Search). The only way to understand why Google would go against their own economical interests is because they attempt to blackmail the publishers, using their leverage in Search to coerce them into terms on the News offer.

      The thing is, Google only has a leverage when they can negotiate terms with each individual publication, where negotiate means "Google won't pay a cent, take it or leave it". Publications who get delisted instantly lose to their news outlet competitors. But when those things are made into law, delisting the entire news outlets of a country won't play in favour of Google. People still want to check national and local news, so if google delists the entire nation, people will start using Bing or whatever else that accepts the terms of the law (we don't hear Microsoft complaining, that means they'll be happy to eat Gogole's lunch).

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Why would Kiwis want 'news' curated by a foreign power?

        You yanks can shove your imperialism up your backside.

        At least it's not Rupert Merdecock.

      • Google has little real leverage.

        For instance their rules say that if you give Google a summary you can't then go paywall the click-through.

        But sites do it all the time.

        Google's resource is to delist them. But they never do.

        They have a form where you can complain but they just /dev/null those.

    • It's not about whether it is good or bad for business it is just a way for the government to bribe big media companies using someone else's money. The Canadian government did this a few years ago. Google and Facebook both said they would drop Canadian news stories. In the end Google did a deal to keep the news but paying slightly less than the original demand which Facebook refused and dropped all Canadian news sources.

      The result so far is that big media companies did ok from the deal, smaller ones did n

    • You're blaming the victim. It's the woman's fault for wearing a provocative skirt. If she didn't want to be catcalled and groped, she should worn dull clothing, or a sandwich board saying "stay away".

      The news sites aren't dumping their stuff on Google's lawn. Google's computers are actively scraping their sites for news and headlines, and then displaying those news and headlines in a way that doesn't necessarily require the user to click on them. The onus is not on the news outlet to do anything. It's

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Google said many years ago that they were ignoring robots.txt. Most crawlers do these days.

      In the past when Google has made this threat, they ended up paying. It's a negotiating tactic. The data is valuable to them and they will most likely capitulate.

  • Negotiating Tactic (Score:3)

    by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Friday October 04, 2024 @06:59PM (#64840853)

    This is just Google negotiating on a final price. We've been through this before with Google. Its M.O. is to threaten deindexing, then accept a counteroffer. Google will cave, and New Zealand will get its money.

    • This is exactly what happened in Canada. They made a big fuss about how they would withdraw, looked at how much ad revenue they were leaving on the table and then swung a deal with the Federal government for slightly less than the full amount so they could claim they got something.

      Interestingly Facebook did not do that though and now do not link to any Canadian news sources which has lead to a huge drop in Canadians getting their news from Facebook and has also forced government to develop non-Facebook m

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      This is just Google negotiating on a final price. We've been through this before with Google. Its M.O. is to threaten deindexing, then accept a counteroffer. Google will cave, and New Zealand will get its money.

      As a result of doing this in Australia, google has de-prioritised most Australian media sources, especially outside of Australia. You'll rarely see articles from the Australian or other Murdoch owned media (Murdoch owns most of it, hence he was practically able to write said law in Australia). NZ doesn't have a market with nearly as much power as Australia either.

  • Third option:t Google could link to the news sites without ripping off their content (except for the headline).
    Eg: unless it has an agreement with the news site, Google (and Facebook, and others) would be allowed to use the headline and link to the article.

    • When I go to news.google.com, I see article headlines, and about every fourth article has a thumbnail of a photo.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by SirSlud ( 67381 )

        Do a google search about something topical. Click on the "news" tab. Google has a picture and at least one sentence from the deep-linked article for *every* result.

        • OH MY GOSH, an ENTIRE ONE SENTENCE? How are all the newspaper editors GOING TO GET PAID if Google doesn't subsidize them?!?!

          • OH MY GOSH, an ENTIRE ONE SENTENCE?

            You seem to be unaware of how news articles are written. I guess news writing wasn't a topic in your literature classes back in school?

            It works like this: the first sentence of an article is the most important and informative. The second paragraph adds most relevant supporting information. The following paragraphs go about adding less and less important details, until the topic is exhausted.

            This allows syndicated news buyers to purchase articles in bulk from news providers, then fit the articles purchase to

        • Do a google search about something topical. Click on the "news" tab. Google has a picture and at least one sentence from the deep-linked article for *every* result.

          Nope. Doesn't matter whether I'm in my own window or in an incognito window. Headline and a photo only. I'm in California; haven't tried using SurfShark to see if it differs elsewhere.

    • That's literally all it does. https://news.google.com/home [google.com]

      Look at Google News, it's a short description and a title. Google has never shown the entire website or article for any site they index.

      AI is different, but I don't think we're talking about AI here. That's an easy fix though. You use ChatGPT 4o-mini to rewrite your article into a summary and display that to Google instead of the full article, so that people will click through for more details.

      I guarentee though, if they ban news, people will

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      As you can see with slashdot, most people don't read beyond the headline. It's a genuine problem.

      Just as journalists having gone from investigative and neutral to access journalists and propaganda professionals to chase the clicks and sources on the cheap. So now headlines are often in direct conflict with body of the story, and both headline and body are in conflict with reality.

  • google's been a shithole forever. capitalism's free market bullshit is proven to all be lies by the fact that nothing has replaced google yet.

  • Wouldn't it be fun if NZ media at this point say "So remind us again why we should use Google Tag Manager and YouTube if you're not linking us, mate."

    If the whole of NZ media is delinked from Google, you can bet your last kiwifruit that alternatives will pop up locally - as well as driving the NZ public from Google to Duckduckgo, Playeur and all the rest. Good thing IMHO, and the local IT industry would be cracking open a few celebratory beersies. The Kiwis have a lot to say about colonial attitudes at the moment.

  • Centre-right? Yeah, right. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gleenie ( 412916 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .neerg.c.nomis.> on Friday October 04, 2024 @09:05PM (#64841061)

    *This* National government ain't centre-right. They're almost right-wing enough for the US.

  • Ok (Score:1)

    by fodder69 ( 701416 )

    Ok

  • Have we forgotten what the press is for? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cliffjumper222 ( 229876 ) on Saturday October 05, 2024 @01:02AM (#64841283)

    Okay, rant activated! Writing and publishing the news—much like writing and publishing music—is on life support. These days, only the big players or national entities have any chance of making it commercially viable. For the other 99%, there’s simply no money in it anymore. This hits local news especially hard. Imagine there’s a power outage in your town, and you want to know what caused it. Was it vandalism? Seismic activity? Or maybe the local council cut corners on infrastructure maintenance? This is the sort of thing your local paper or radio station would have covered a decade ago. Now? Good luck. You’ll likely never know—and that means no one will ever be held accountable.

    Think about the issues that actually affect your life: sewage, local corruption, crime, school problems, who’s running the council, dangerous situations. These matter more to you than national elections or the latest foreign conflict, yet finding reliable info on them is becoming impossible. If local journalism isn’t already gone in your area, it’s probably on its way out. Say goodbye to staying informed. Sa-yo-na-ra!

    The *only* solution is finding a way to fund news gathering and journalism—somehow. No one wants to pay for it, yet...

    The tragedy here is that local journalism is critical for holding power in check at the community level. National outlets handle the big-ticket items, sure, but local reporters are the ones investigating why your neighborhood floods every year, why your school isn't getting enough funding, and where public money is going. These journalists are the watchdogs who keep local governments and councilors under scrutiny. When decisions about selling public land or cutting emergency services are made, they’re often the only ones telling you what’s at stake.

    Without local journalism, local leaders get a free pass to operate in the shadows. There's no one to investigate backroom deals or expose mismanagement of public funds. The direct impact on your community and daily life is immense, but without journalists to uncover the truth, you're left in the dark.

    Local journalism is more than just a watchdog, though. It builds community, connects people, and highlights the achievements of your neighbors. It amplifies the voices of local businesses and artists. Without it, towns lose their sense of identity and become isolated from their own stories. It’s not just a loss of accountability—it’s a loss of community cohesion.

    So when we talk about funding journalism, it’s not just about keeping national outlets alive. It’s about ensuring your town stays informed, your leaders are held accountable, and your community retains its character. Sure, no one wants to pay for it, but the cost of losing it is far greater. And this isn’t some abstract problem—it’s already real. I live in a local news desert. There is literally *no* information available about what’s happening in my town. The closest coverage I can get comes from a city an hour away. It’s isolating.

    So, how do we fix this? The only real solution might be community-supported journalism funded through taxes—something like a local PBS/BBC/NHK model. Alternatively, maybe charities could step in. Either way, we as a society need this, right? Or are we just going to sit back and assume everything will be fine? (Insert that meme of the dog sitting in a burning house drinking coffee here).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Whibla ( 210729 )

      Okay, rant activated!

      If only I still had mod points - it's often the way: nothing worth really promoting, so you let them slip away, then someone speaks truth.

      So, you'll have to settle for this 'pointless' reply I'm afraid.

      Either way, we as a society need this, right?

      Right!

  • Although the shrinkage is being blamed on the Internet there are also a couple of other possibilities in New Zealand.

    The first is that people are moving elsewhere as the New Zealand media have extreme political slants in a couple of areas.

    Secondly, much of the media was reposts from overseas. Now people can just go to the source.

    Thirdly, and probably the greatest problem is that the government is in broadcasting with radio and television stations and although some of these make a profit they also cannot

  • If there's one thing we can be certain of, it is that Google are making money from what they are doing wrt "linking" to other's news publications. So, it's not unreasonable for those others to ask for a share of it, even if they do already make more due to increased traffic.
    It is not a binary issue. Both sides have to do the maths and decide if it is still worth their while with the new share of profits. It's not "all or nothing", like Google seem to be implying.

    It sounds an awful lot like what they did in

  • "Auf Wiedersehen, adieu Adieu, adieu To you and you and you"

  • I often click through Google News articles if sn article is interesting.

    That's not the same as informative.

    The trouble is a one-sentence summary is sufficient for maybe 60% of all informative news articles.

    All the rest is fluff from a bygone era where selling broadsheet ad space was the business nodel.

    Google should do a deal with X to use their Grok to extract those one-sentence summaries from primary sources.

    Then they won't need local "journalists" who frankly could be using their talents for more than fil

  • Don't threaten them with a good time google.
  • Canadian here, this was a disaster in our country. Not so much because of what happened with Google but the government getting involved and causing the censhorship of Facebook news. We lost our local news outlets, domestic news outlets, and foreign news outlets. Like, there's a thing going on in Israel, I have no idea what the general public sentiment is because our Liberal government caused Facebook to censor world news because the government wants Facebook to pay for that. Wait, what? The news outlets rec

  • But they backed down and came to an agreement with the government.

    Facebook didn't, but that's fine. Not seeing news on Facebook is a plus IMO.

  • I used to use Google News, but then I noticed that there were always one or two stories near the top which talked about some great product I could buy cheaper. These stories always contained sponsored links. Even though I had blacklisted those websites, I still got those stories.

  • Get them to pay tax while your at it. Google get a tonne of ad revenue paid to them internationally, so the New Zealand revenue is tiny compared to revenue originating from New Zealand. If the want to play hard ball, play hard ball.

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