Google Is Protesting a Canadian Law By Blocking News In Search Results (www.cbc.ca) 107
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC: Google is blocking some Canadian users from viewing news content in what the company says is a test run of a potential response to the Liberal government's online news bill. Also known as Bill C-18, the Online News Act would require digital giants such as Google and Meta, which owns Facebook, to negotiate deals that would compensate Canadian media companies for republishing their content on their platforms. The company said Wednesday that it is temporarily limiting access to news content for under four per cent of its Canadian users as it assesses possible responses to the bill. The change applies to its ubiquitous search engine as well as the Discover feature on Android devices, which carries news and sports stories. All types of news content are being affected by the test, which will run for about five weeks, the company said. That includes content created by Canadian broadcasters and newspapers.
In a news release, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) said Google's tactics just reinforce why Bill C-18 is so "vital," adding that Google and other global digital giants are showing they do not intend to play fair. "These are bully tactics, and Google is trying to push the Senate to back down on Bill C-18. We hope senators will see these actions for what they are," said CAB president Kevin Desjardins. "Bill C-18 was introduced to set up fair negotiations between news organizations and these global digital giants on the value of their news content. Google has shown they're willing to block Canadians' vital access to legitimate news content to maintain their dominance in the advertising field." Meta threatened to stop the sharing of news links in Canada last year if C-18 passed as currently written.
The social media company temporarily shut down news feeds in Australia after a similar law was introduced. It took effect in March 2021 and has largely worked, according to a government report.
CBC notes: "More than 450 news outlets in Canada have closed since 2008, including 64 in the last two years."
In a news release, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) said Google's tactics just reinforce why Bill C-18 is so "vital," adding that Google and other global digital giants are showing they do not intend to play fair. "These are bully tactics, and Google is trying to push the Senate to back down on Bill C-18. We hope senators will see these actions for what they are," said CAB president Kevin Desjardins. "Bill C-18 was introduced to set up fair negotiations between news organizations and these global digital giants on the value of their news content. Google has shown they're willing to block Canadians' vital access to legitimate news content to maintain their dominance in the advertising field." Meta threatened to stop the sharing of news links in Canada last year if C-18 passed as currently written.
The social media company temporarily shut down news feeds in Australia after a similar law was introduced. It took effect in March 2021 and has largely worked, according to a government report.
CBC notes: "More than 450 news outlets in Canada have closed since 2008, including 64 in the last two years."
Yeah! (Score:5, Insightful)
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What's your problem with uBlock Origin?
I think that anyone who still sees ads, wants to see ads. Otherwise, why would they keep loading them?
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Google did negotiate a deal with them, they can edit their robots.txt file to specify which of their content they do or don't want Google to use for free. Most of them pay SEO companies to have Google "steal" a greater portion of their content.
Google, Facebook etc... are rent taking parasites (Score:2)
Google, Facebook etc... are rent taking privacy violating parasites
When corporations seek to undermine democratic created laws there need to be questions.
Frankly they have far to much influence already with "custom search results".
There are good alternatives...
Where you aren't the product...
eg: https://duckduckgo.com/ [duckduckgo.com]
eg: https://www.signal.org/ [signal.org]
That said I'm still working to reduce my dependence on "free" isn't "free" apps / sites, as they are pervasive...
good luck with that (Score:3)
Yeah history says they will fold. (Score:1)
Worked really well in Europe and Australia.
I was wondering the same thing [aljazeera.com].
Seems doomed, maybe third time is the charm? But with a record of paying up, who would not pass laws demanding Google share some of that sweet Google Cash?
Re: Yeah history says they will fold. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Yeah history says they will fold. (Score:5, Insightful)
A law should not be used to replace what a contract can address. If the news organizations dont want their content on search engines under the current terms, they can use a robots.txt file. Google without that content isnt as comprehensive a search engine as the news sites. So, whats the problem?
That Google, Meta/Facebook et al. feel that they are entitled to re-publish the content that other people paid money to create, post a tiny link to the original article down at the bottom somewhere, and then use the content to rake in advertising cash that would otherwise have gone to the original content creator. In nature this business model is known as parasitism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], in this analogy media creators are the fish and Google, Meta/Facebook, et al. are the tongue louse: https://www.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]. Unlike the tongue louse, however, killing the host is a win-win situation for Meta/Facebook, Google, et al. because by making these media outlets invisible results in them going bankrupt (as evidenced by 450 news outlets in Canada having closed since 2008) and Meta/Facebook, Google, et al. being able to replace them as sole news providers which bring us to the topic of why gatekeepers, monopoly and abusive business practices are bad in a multitude of ways. Especially because they kill competition and replace them with monoculture. What makes it even worse is that in the case of Meta/Facebook in particular news reporting was replaced by sewage like Q-Anon and other conspiracy theories. Google and Meta/Facebook in particular should be in the business of impartially directing people to news sites and not putting news outlets out of business and replacing news with conspiracy theories without regard for the consequences out of nothing but raw greed.
Re: Yeah history says they will fold. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're ignoring the fact that the news sites actually do their own SEO BS, so they want the search engines to find them, but their paywalls result in people just going to the next link.
"Google News" tends to not carry these SEO garbage clickbait sites, but even then...
So in Canada, you basically get CBC, CTV, and Global News as "reliable news sources" and then you get some local news papers which are essentially 1-person outfits and clickbait content farms that recycle associated press and reuters stories. Why should I read a news story anywhere but the source?
It's like if Slashdot had to pay Washington Post or New York Times every time someone linked to the story. Just the very idea of it is stupid.
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You're ignoring the fact that the news sites actually do their own SEO BS, so they want the search engines to find them, but their paywalls result in people just going to the next link.
"Google News" tends to not carry these SEO garbage clickbait sites, but even then...
So in Canada, you basically get CBC, CTV, and Global News as "reliable news sources" and then you get some local news papers which are essentially 1-person outfits and clickbait content farms that recycle associated press and reuters stories. Why should I read a news story anywhere but the source?
It's like if Slashdot had to pay Washington Post or New York Times every time someone linked to the story. Just the very idea of it is stupid.
The thing is that traditionally news media has largely survived on adversing, subscriptions were a fairly minor source of income, this has not changed and the news outlets realise this because it is the reality they have lived in for centuries. The problem is not any lack of comprehension on the part of news outlets, problem is that anybody who does business on the internet is effectively doing it in Google's walled garden. Google's walled garden has one gate called 'Google Search'. There are a few alterna
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If this was truly based on controlling their own content they would have long ago built their own meta news site as a consortium of all their big (and small) players. T
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It's like if Slashdot had to pay Washington Post or New York Times every time someone linked to the story.
It's not exactly the same. Everyone knows that slashdot readers actually open the links and read the original articles, so the linked sites still get their advertisement hits. :-)
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It's like Slashdot except the summaries are actually the relevant bits of the articles instead of some random chunk.
Re: Yeah history says they will fold. (Score:5, Informative)
How is Facebook republishing anything? All that appears when you share a link is the title, the picture and maybe a few initial words. Nothing else. You have to visit the article to read it in its entirety.
Google News looks pretty similar here. You certainly cannot read the article on Google (News), you have to go to the source website.
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People tend to jump to conclusions the moment they read the title. And then spend time discussing in comments.
Also this is the reason whymost headlines are clickbaity nowadays. "this PERSON did this CONTROVERSIAL THING and EVERYONE REACTED". I swear they're getting more generic every day... but people are curious and want to see, so they click. Clickbait is the only way to drive actual traffic to the websites and prevent facebook from stealing it.
Re: Yeah history says they will fold. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Horseshit. These news stories are indexed by Google because they want them to be. If the publisher doesnt want Google to publish this content which is behind a paywall, fine. Put it in your robots.txt file. What they really want is their cake and eat it too. They want Google search traffic so they SEO enough info to give Google traffic while being paid for readers of the content who find that content on Google sufficient. Fuck no. You control what Google sees. Besides, if these articles are behind a paywall, Google is subject to the same internet routing as any browser. They donâ(TM)t pay for paywalled content and republish it. If I were Google in this case, I would absolutely not index these sites at all and drive 0 traffic to them until they cried uncle. Fuck these news organization for trying to get the government to enforce a business arrangement on another business because they couldnt get what they wanted through fair negotiation. I would fuck them over on principle. There are plenty of sources happy to be crawled. Half of publisher news is really opinion anyway, and biased at that.
Horse shit. Not everybody is behind a pay wall, nor do they necessarily want to rely on subscriptions for survival. Furthermore, if they had adequate advertising revenue, many would not have to be behind a pay-wall in the first place. The problem started when Google went from being just another search engine to also being an advertising giant and decided that All your advertising revenue are belong to Google. You can try to convince us that Google is something other than just another greedy and abusive mono
Re: Yeah history says they will fold. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem started when Craigslist ruined the newspapers' cash cow - classified ads - and they had no plan for replacing that revenue. There have other problems since then, but I'm not convinced Google is the most serious of them.
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In a globally accessible network you can't recycle the same AP story on your local media outlet and expect traffic to beat a path to your door. They want to reap the same old profits of the bygone era of local newsprint in the time of mobile devices and ubiquitous Internet access. You can only squeez
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That's a pretty stupid take
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Your argument ignores the fact that google drives a majority of the traffic to these sites. You assume that every ad dollar that Google receives is a dollar lost by the news sites, but this plainly isn't the case. This was abundantly clear when they turned off these services in Spain when they passed a similar law years ago and the news companies almost immediately begged for things to go back to the way they was before.
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The previews of news articles that appear in places like facebook and twitter are under the control of the news sites. All of that stuff runs thru the and news agencies are free to not implement it if they don't want their content to be embedded in other sites. Or if they think too much is there, they are free to provide less content within the protocol response. [oembed.com]
IMO legacy news media should be allowed to go out of business. Its already a monoculture because they all just regurgitate stories from the AP
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So, what's the problem?
That Google, Meta/Facebook et al. feel that they are entitled to re-publish the content that other people paid money to create, post a tiny link to the original article down at the bottom somewhere, and then use the content to rake in advertising cash that would otherwise have gone to the original content creator. ... ...
because by making these media outlets invisible results in them going bankrupt...
Especially because they kill competition...
Wow, that's quite a lot you've packed in there. And a lot of it is contradictory.
On the one hand, you are saying that (Big Tech Companies) are taking content for free. On the other, you are saying that if those same companies don't do that, (news company) will go bankrupt. So your answer is "force Big Tech Companies to take that content AND THEN force them to pay for it." Huh. I don't think that works the way you think it works.
You say (Big Tech Companies) make (news companies) invisible. And yet some
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A law should not be used to replace what a contract can address. If the news organizations dont want their content on search engines under the current terms, they can use a robots.txt file. Google without that content isnt as comprehensive a search engine as the news sites. So, whats the problem?
Google stopped honoring robots.txt a few years ago.
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There are apparently other ways to tell search engines not to index a page though.
https://www.singlegrain.com/ne... [singlegrain.com]
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Or let them index as much as they like...
https://libraryofbabel.info/ [libraryofbabel.info]
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Testing edge case scenarios of that argument: slavery is a contract. A large percentage of slaves in history sold themselves into slavery to get out of bad economic situation.
There should be laws that ban slavery if we think slavery is unacceptably bad, even if entered into voluntarily.
I can think of at least five similar things that we ban contracting for, for largely the same reason.
I.e. large scale issues like this are issue of ethics and morality of the time. Some things are acceptable, some are not. Er
Re:good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
If "really well" means it temporarily diverted some of Google's revenue stream to Rupert Murdock's pockets, then sure. But if it means it will save the traditional newspapers, then no [theguardian.com].
The newspapers revenue base was their classifieds, and it's gone. It was wasn't taken by Google or Facebook. It was taken by the Internet because shopping on the internet is easier, faster and cheaper. In todays world buying a newpaper to look up the classifieds makes about as much sense sending important news by sending a telegram costing a few cents per word.
I can't speak on the European law, but the law in Australia was obviously their final hurrah while the had political influence. Their first draft of the law (and by "their" I mean News Corp, as no one else would have had the audacity) demanded not only money, but among other things the ability to edit posts from the public on their Facebook pages. Google and Facebook threatened to leave the country (in fact Facebook did prevent Australian's from posting any news links for a while) until it was reduced to "just" a demand for money. Insane. Yet every politician of every colour supported it.
It was an amazing display of political spineless sycophantism. The really impressive bit is Rupert not only managed to buy a law that put his fingers in Google's and Facebook's pockets, he also managed to damage some of his smaller traditional competition at the same time. Quoting the Sydney morning Herald [slashdot.org]: Most of the small publishers who will speak to the ACCC this week will not be eligible for payments under the code.
Re:good luck with that (Score:4)
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There is already a government mechanism for collecting Google/Facebook money - taxation. No need to break the purpose of hyperlinks, just tax the companies more. Then if they want to support poor Rupert, they can pay him a Journalism Rescue Package and make it explicit.
If you want to rip somebody's news article verbatim that they paid a reporter to investigate and write and publish it on your website you have to pay for that copyrighted content. Why should Google and Meta be able to get away with not doing that? Especially because they are gatekeepers that literally monopolise two very common ways by which people access news, search engines and social media. Monopolies are bad, abusive business practices are bad, using the latter to kill off an entire competitive industry
Re:good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to rip somebody's news article verbatim that they paid a reporter to investigate and write and publish it on your website you have to pay for that copyrighted content. Why should Google and Meta be able to get away with not doing that?
Is that what they're doing? Or are they posting a headline, a sentence, and a link?
I don't want to rely on Google and Facebook to find out what is going on in the world
Then don't. Nobody is making you.
Where the problem really starts is when everybody except a few oligarchs like Murdoch are left and they start making exclusive contracts with the likes of Google and Meta to distribute their news because most of the competition has been killed off and whatever slivers of it that have managed to survive will be silenced by Google and Meta either not showing results from those sites or downgrading their content to the 14th page of search results.
I see the monopolization of news from the supply side to be the far more problematic issue with this scenario.
Re:good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
There is already a government mechanism for collecting Google/Facebook money - taxation. [...] if they want to support poor Rupert, they can pay him a Journalism Rescue Package and make it explicit.
The model you propose is the Government gets directly involved and manages who gets the money. This goes against principles of good administration where the Government is involved at the minimum possible in private affairs. It also includes high risks of one day a Minister/Secretary of State to decide funding based on their personal opinion in liking/disliking particular news outlets.
The proposed mechanism is the establishment of a sort of royalty mechanism, protected by the law but without involvement of the governing administration to make choices on who gets money and how the money transits. It's impartial and also more parsimonious in public fund, by not using the time of government employees.
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The model you propose is the Government gets directly involved and manages who gets the money.
This is already true regardless. They decide which organizations get money based on eligibility criteria, which they can go back and change any time by passing another bill.
Re:good luck with that (Score:4, Funny)
The Guardian is an interesting example because it managed to successfully move to an online, voluntary subscription model where there are no paywalls. That was supplemented by things like a dating website.
I can see why people might want to date other Guardian readers, people with somewhat compatible politics. Outfits like the far right Daily Mail don't really have that option.
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Meanwhile the law proposed in the US attempts to prohibit the platforms (Google, etc.) from removing any news outlets from their platform once they decide they want to negotiate for payments. In other words, if a newspaper asks Google for some money in exchange for posting links to their site, Google would not be allowed to say "no, thank you" and cease linking to that site.
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The newspapers revenue base was their classifieds, and it's gone. It was wasn't taken by Google or Facebook. It was taken by the Internet because shopping on the internet is easier, faster and cheaper. In todays world buying a newpaper to look up the classifieds makes about as much sense sending important news by sending a telegram costing a few cents per word.
You have precisely summed up the problem. I remember the days of subscribing to the newspaper for the Sunday sales ads, the stock market numbers, the comics and the daily classifieds. The actual news stories were a bonus. How many people buy the paper to job hunt? Their business model is as dead as old Jacob Marley. Google did not kill it. Craig's List, Facebook Marketplace, LinkedIn, Indeed, Yahoo Finance, Amazon, and various store and grocery apps did.
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Don't forget the rule that if they published news they would have to publish news from News Corp.
(and news included things like a company advertising a sale)
Fair dealing in Canada (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny that Canadian news outlets can take your photos of a news event and use them with out compensation as long as they credit you. I had this happen even with a photo that has my watermark with CC NC-BY-SA words as part of the water mark. No one contacted me if they could use it.
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As far as I'm aware they don't need to. An associated picture in a news story doesn't meet the requirements of commercial use (not being used for advertisement or primary revenue), and the CC XX-BY-SA doesn't require people to ask you anything, just throw the source in the by-line.
It sounds (often too common) like you didn't understand the terms of the license you applied.
Re: Fair dealing in Canada (Score:3)
Doesn't matter what that the license is even with full rights reserved Canadian Fair Dealing allows commercial entities to use your image(s) of a news event with no compensation or requests to use the image as long as they credit you. They can fuck off with their complaints about Google listing their news articles and linking to them.
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There's a difference between sharing an image of public interest for the public and authoring a story. You'll find most countries don't consider putting a picture in the news a commercial activity for which rights can be reserved.
The carve out is specifically there due to the early days of photography and print news causing companies to sue newspapers under the claim of ownership of their logos and likeliness which led to a period where people were concerned that news papers would literally not be able to s
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Go big tech! (Score:1)
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It's a mixed blessing. Many people see the summary in the Google search results and don't bother to go to the original source for more info. Ad revenue stays with Google.
Just like the summary of the articles in Slashdot is enough for most people and few bother to RTFA. Many read the summary, comment on just that information, and don't bother to go to the source. If Slashdot still had the readership that caused the "Slashdot effect" decades ago, some news sites might be looking at Slashdot for compensati
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That's because, frequently, the article isn't *WORTH* reading.
Slashdotters will post the intersting bits, or complain about what
was missing, wrong, outdated, etc.
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If Slashdot still had the readership that caused the "Slashdot effect" decades ago, some news sites might be looking at Slashdot for compensation.
That's a contradiction. The Slashdot effect happened because the readership attempted to access the site.
The joke that the Slashdotters comment without RTFA is borne out of the fact that often we couldn't RTFA for a few hours after a story was posted.
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Tip of the iceberg (Score:5, Interesting)
This is some kinda silly language (Score:3)
So Canada proposes that Google/Facebook will need to pay to link to news sites. In response to the price increase, those entities might chose not to link to them if the (new) cost is not worth it to them.
Now whether or not extracting a payment here makes sense, especially in the context of FB where one user is sharing a link to another user or group of users, they can't really be mad at the platforms if they decide after all they'd rather not pay for those links. Otherwise it's like saying that any entity that decides to purchase less (or not at all) of some item is somehow retaliating for the price increasing. It's nothing of the sort -- sellers can set prices, buyers can accept, ask for better or just do without.
Maybe Google News brings in enough ad revenue that they can offer the publishers an acceptable cut and still have margins rather than walk away. Maybe the numbers don't work.
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Why doesn't Google just read all the news at once, do some arbitrage between the different versions, and then use a LLM to write the articles back. It's what human journalists do. Just make sure they are sufficiently differently worded from all their sources. Maybe we could have decent news without ad spam.
I like your idea. It makes a lot of sense, except for the last sentence. News without ad spam? From the planet's biggest advertising company?
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Why doesn't Google just read all the news at once, do some arbitrage between the different versions and then use a LLM to write the articles back.
If they are using the original text as a basis for an automated modified version, then the copyright of the original writer applies. At least, this is how it works right now and until a high court says otherwise.
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I only read the summary but I don't think that's what they are proposing. It says "republishing their content", as in the snippets of news and the photos that Google News publishes as part of its website, and in the various feeds in Android and Chrome.
Did Google create Google News and those feeds to help news publishers, or is it using them for revenue? Given how ruthlessly Google kills off services that don't make money, I'm guessing the latter. It doesn't seem unreasonable that if they are making money al
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Isn't that was /. does? A submission is a link to a story with a small snippet included so folks can see if the article interests them. I don't see how the snippet makes it much different from just having a bare link except that the latter probably won't entice anyone to click through.
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Indeed it is, and your could make the argument that Slashdot should contribute to the source. There is a difference though, in that Slashdot stories and snippets age contributed by users, with editorial oversight. I haven't really thought it through enough to say what the implication of that is.
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block? (Score:4, Insightful)
Characterizing this action with a straight face as constituting "blocking" content is... disappointing. When search engines index publishers content and offer links to the orginal stories, that's - also disappointingly - characterised as "theft," yet when they fail to offer those links, that's somehow even worse. The fact is that Canadian leaders see on the one hand see the very real problem of failing Canadian media organisations and on the other an obscenely big pile of money at Google and think they've found a fix. But why the guy with the big pile of money would go along with this scheme has never been clear.
Nobody seems to ask why publishers pay big bucks on SEO schemes if they believe those hits on their content constitute theft.
As a Canadian.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I am 100% on Google's side on this one.
This is not Google trying to bully the Canadian Government into obeying its wishes, it is simply illustrating the inevitable consequence that will arise if Canada tries to push this kind of idiotic legislation through. Canada is simply too small of a market for a megalithic company like Google to be particularly concerned about losing access to that market segment, so hey.... sucks to be us, I guess.
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Canada is simply too small of a market for a megalithic company like Google to be particularly concerned about losing access to that market segment, so hey.... sucks to be us, I guess.
Australia is smaller than Canada.
https://www.wired.co.uk/articl... [wired.co.uk]
But scarily, Canada's GDP is only 7 times more than Googles revenue. Google would make the top 50 list if it were a country.
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If Google is vital then pay them (Score:2)
If Google is so vital to their operations that people won't receive the news WITHOUT Google, then it sounds to me like the news organizations should be paying Google, not the other way around.
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If Google is so vital to their operations that people won't receive the news WITHOUT Google, then it sounds to me like the news organizations should be paying Google, not the other way around.
Google is a monopolist. If the search engine business was a fiercely competitive environment then this wouldn't be happening because people would have a choice between many alternative search engines of equal power to Google's. What do we have? ... Bing, Baidu, Yandex ... this: https://kinsta.com/wp-content/... [kinsta.com] ... is not a picture of a healthy and competitive market
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Two and a bit years ... (Score:1)
and people are still relying on Google for their news aggregation?
Google should call it advertising... (Score:2)
Google should call it advertising and bill the newspapers for every link that their spider has indexed.
Who needs Google? (Score:2)
Never used anything from them except search. Have moved to DuckDuckGo for searching about 2 years ago and no intention of moving back to Google. Except for Android, Google is redundant these days. And Android would survive without Google. Maybe then we could get long-term stable versions...
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I can find my local papers for news using any of the search engines , there is nothing special about google.
Once I have found them, I bookmark them, there is ZERO need to use google to read news.
Google et al are just forcing a race to the bottom for news quality, those that read the news on that service do not use the actual media outlets
Google gathers ad revenue, media out lets get strangled.
A free, functioning, worthwhile news/media syste
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Indeed. I also have a digital subscription for a local newspaper. Pretty cheap actually and they are not halfway bad. Of course they have all the agency stuff as well.
Parallels? (Score:5, Interesting)
I see a strong parallel here between the Google / news provider conflict and media 'piracy'. Google's republishing of news articles is analogous to people copying music, movies, and TV series and making them available on torrent sites. There is no 'theft' in the traditional sense - no physical materials have changed hands, and the original supply isn't any the smaller for having been republished. But the effect on originators is the same, because the republishing denies them revenue which they might otherwise have collected.
I see another parallel here as well. In manufacturing, globalization destroyed many industrial centres; a reduction in overall redundancy converted regional markets into national and global ones. It also cost manufacturing and supply chains a lot of resilience.
Arguably, the Web has done the same things to the news ecosystem. News is just information, and The Web is its new supply chain. It's global; traditional news markets are becoming rust belts as a result, and news has less variety and fewer perspectives - less resilience, if you will. Google's role is simply that of the biggest information broker on The Web.
Google seems reluctant to share their ad revenue with news organizations - which are effectively content providers - even though they're quite willing to pay (admittedly small) amounts of compensation to YouTubers. I see a disconnect here, and I wonder if a shift in perspective might help.
What if news companies shared their ad revenue with Google instead, in return for Google agreeing not to insert its own ad content in the news it has appropriated? Just a thought, and probably not a practical one, but maybe it will encourage other ideas.
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The youtube ad program is a sore in google's history. It was put in place to grow (and grow it did). But then came facebook and instagram and, as it turned out, there are people willing to do videos for free.
I'm sure google is considering to move to full demonetization once the algorithm decides that enough non-monetized content is being watched. When that happens, they'll cancel it and no one (but them) will be making video off youtube ad revenue.
It's also worth noting how google is willing to fight in cou
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If a headline and a sentence or two is satisfactory to the readers, then either they're not really all that interested in news to begin with, or the news outlets aren't really doing very much. Either way, they're in trouble with or without Google.
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Google's republishing of news articles is analogous to people copying music, movies, and TV series and making them available on torrent sites.
It's really not.
Copyright law allows reuse of small portions of copyrighted works in certain cases, and what Google is doing is within the law. Republishing entire works is an entirely different thing, one that is not allowed by copyright law. Note that there's no discrimination based on who is doing it here. You, also, can use small snippets of copyrighted work without concern, and Google is also not allowed to republish an entire movie, or song, or even a large chunk of either one, without consequence.
A very dumb move (Score:2)
While many Canadians don't like bill C-18, nothing unifies Canadians like a foreign company doing something underhanded.
Fuck Google. If they shut down links to news in Canada, it'll just mean I won't use Google News any more.
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If they shut down links to news in Canada, it'll just mean I won't use Google News any more.
Huh? Google News is a thing? I had no idea (I subscribe to our Montreal Gazette and NY Times directly).
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Yeah, I subscribe directly to The Globe and Mail. That, plus CBC, CTV, BBC and DW will give me all the news I need, so I'll just bookmark them.
Google gives free viewership and advertising (Score:1)
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The government wants to force google to pay for the new sites doing Google a service.
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Google is sending them viewers for free.
If Google are doing it, it isn't free.
and nothing of value was lost (Score:3)
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Backfire! (Score:1)
But Google Isn't a Publisher? (Score:3)
So they want to re-publish the works of people who are not given government protection by Section 230 AND they want to do it for free AND they want to collect the advertising revenue AND they want to collect personal information on everyone that accesses it AND they want us to help dry their eyes for them because they are so terribly terribly hurt by the idea that they may ever have to take any responsibility for anything ever.
FUCK OFF
What did you think would happen? (Score:2)
"Either do it our way, or don't do it anymore."
"Okay, we won't do it anymore."
"How DARE you?!"
So who's the bully? (Score:2)
As I see it, Google's test is just seeing what happens if their potential forced negotiation results in no deal. It seems the media companies not only want Google forced to negotiate with them, which is fair-ish, but want them forced to make a deal no matter how bad the terms on offer may be, which is nothing like fair. Part of a negotiation is the right to walk away with no deal. If Google then doesn't access the content it's fair enough.
As others have pointed out, Google has been offering that deal since
Don't blame the tech giants! (Score:2)
If you want to fix news outlets, m
I don't get full articles. (Score:2)