Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Should Google Be Forced To Pay For News?

Posted by timothy on from the according-to-his-need dept.

Barence writes "The Guardian Media group is asking the British government to investigate Google News and other aggregators, claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs. The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour. It wants the government to explore new models that 'require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site (through advertising) and "at the edges" in the world of search and aggregation.'"

7 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Not us. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work in the online division of a particularly large paper.

    We work hand-in-hand with google and push to get as much content on there for free as possible.

    Because we, unlike our moron competitors, understand that these clips bring traffic to our site, which makes us money.

    1. Re:Not us. by clang_jangle · · Score: 4, Interesting

      On the other hand, given your claim to work for a particularly large paper, I have to be a bit sceptical. I happen to use the BBC News web site as my first news source of choice, and I don't need Google to tell me how to find them every day. That being the case, I find it hard to believe that high-profile, high-traffic sites like the Beeb really get more benefit from occasional search hits via Google than a news aggregator would get from scraping all of the headlines from the originating site, and I find Google's argument here to be wishful thinking rather than based on any real merit.

      I'm sure the big papers would rather have more readers like you. The real issue here is that google news is a sort of great equalizer, giving equal exposure and opportunity to many news sources large and small. It isn't that google is stealing their business, it's just helping to make many news sources available that people might not notice otherwise. And that's exactly what I like about it.

      --
      Caveat Utilitor
    2. Re:Not us. by RDW · · Score: 4, Interesting

      'They don't have to ask government to intervene in an area it has neither knowledge, skill nor particular legitimacy.'

      The full response, which you can read here:

      http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/GMG_DBIRResponse.pdf

      is as much a swipe at the BBC as at Google, etc. The 'BBC Trust', installed by the current government a couple of years ago to oversee the Beeb's activities, has shown a worrying tendency to bend over backwards to placate commercial competitors when they start whining about this sort of thing (the Trust are the guys who blocked BBC Radio 3 from releasing any more mp3s after a highly successful experiment with the Beethoven Symphonies, who mandated a 7-day expiry on DRM'd iPlayer content, and who are responsible for junking a range of popular BBC websites). I'm sure the Guardian group would love some pressure to be exerted to further reduce the activities of their main competitor in UK news...

    3. Re:Not us. by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Interesting

      >>>There were. Specifically, the Church was [pissed].

      Bzzzz. The Pope was one of the first persons to buy a printing press (3 in fact), so he could quickly disseminate his orders across Rome, Italy, and the whole of Europe. The Church of the Middle Ages was actually quite progressive - being the key employer of Renaissance artists, musicians, and engineers. If anybody was angry, it was the scribes who were laid-off by the Pope.

      >>>There's plenty of creativity. The masses just don't want to pay

      After the newspapers go out of business, the masses might not have any choice but to pay for their news, either online or on cable. Businesses just need to readjust to this new model.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    4. Re:Not us. by nschubach · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The desire to create, write, express and communicate is simply larger than the capacity for consumers to consume it. With the end result that there is no scarcity to make available any financial incentives.

      And with the Internet, we will either see works of literary art that is really good and deserving of popular praise, or it will be swallowed up and the poor writers will have been found out and put out of jobs. It's simply competition where competition was scarce before. Write meaningful and interesting works and people will suffer through whatever ads or subscription they deem suitable.

      The customer wins.

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  2. The issue explained by Bananenrepublik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Since noone in this thread seems to have understood the issue, here's what I gathered after reading some German-language newspapers (I've not used google news in years, so please point out inaccuracies kindly):

    So far, everytime you clicked on a story on google news, it took you to an article somewhere else. I.e., everytime there was an interesting story on google news, somebody else would share the profit.

    But now google starts running news agency stories themselves. I.e., whenever someone clicks on an AP, say, story, they are redirected to a google news page that carries the AP story. Previously, it would have been some newspaper's page who happened to run that story.

    So far so good. But how does google news decide which agency stories to place on their front page? For that, they use the story placement on the various news sites they're aggregating, and this is where it becomes unfair because this work is an essential part of running a news web site -- unordered newsfeeds aren't worth much, as otherwise everybody would be getting their news from ap.org or whatever.

    In other words, by running stories from news agencies themselves, google has turned from someone benefitting the various news sites into a freeloader.

  3. Maybe I should have made myself clearer by Bananenrepublik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In other words, by running stories from news agencies themselves, google has turned from someone benefitting the various news sites into a freeloader.

    No. If the AP wants to charge Google, they are free to do so. The papers that carry AP stories have not been granted an exclusive license.

    I'll reply to you, but others have misunderstood me the same way. The work a newspaper does is in large parts selecting which agency stories are interesting or relevant. Google lets others do this work for them without compensation. That's the problem. I would have thought that I had made that point quite explicitly in my first point but judging from the numerous replies, apparently I didn't.