Slashdot Mirror
Google Threatens French Media Ban
another random user writes in with a BBC story about Google's displeasure with proposed French plans to make search engines pay for content. "Google has threatened to exclude French media sites from search results if France goes ahead with plans to make search engines pay for content. In a letter sent to several ministerial offices, Google said such a law 'would threaten its very existence.' French newspaper publishers have been pushing for the law, saying it is unfair that Google receives advertising revenue from searches for news. French Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti also favors the idea. She told a parliamentary commission it was 'a tool that it seems important to me to develop.'"
There's no french money, there's only european money. That's the problem.
Just put a complete paywall up over your news. Then you don't have to worry about anyone ever reading it again.
Instituting a law that makes search-engines PAY content providers for click-through links from searches will obviously result in ALL links to media being dropped from search results.
The phrase you're looking for is NATURAL CONSEQUENCES.
Personally I think The Big G should have immediately dropped all search results leading to French Media Sites with a HUGE banner saying "this is what THAT LAW requires us to do".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
If I were Google I'd wait for the law to become effective and then switch off France altogether. Not allowing other search engines to take over beforehand but still serving the French right.
The finest form of Internet cleansing. Everyone's a winner.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Google isn't reading the newssites. The general public is reading the newssites.
Google is helping them by sending more readers. They really think that they get that service for free?
Are they really that dense?
I expect Google to flip that switch off when the law is passed.
We should start referring to processes which run in the background by their correct technical name... paenguins.
they'll soon come crawling back...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Please stop saying "the French" and say "the French government" instead.
Being governed by incompetent morons doesn't make us so.
You mean if we all run out and start buying french fries again, it won't help? Maybe I should stick to freedom fries. They taste a little better.
"How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?"
-- Charles De Gaulle
Personally I'm on the fence with this one. On one hand, if there was functional competition in searching market, and one company delisted sites hence reducing quality of service, people would flock to competitors and site would lose. Unfortunately google does in fact have a de facto (and at least according to some EU organs de jure) monopoly on search.
On the other hand, while being a monopoly isn't illegal, it does apply heavy limits to what you can do. For example, leveraging your monopoly to get better terms is often illegal. This is a clear-cut case of monopoly leveraging to strong-arm the media outlets. Granted, google is making a killing from its business model and is unlikely to be willing to part with a cut of a cake, especially considering that if it gives cut to one party, it will likely end up having to give such a cut to everyone. This would demolish google.
Either way, this is a very difficult case to call either way, there's far more to it then meets the eye on the first glance. Both sides have very compelling arguments to bring to the table.
I call bullshit. Google doesn't "slap advertisements on content that other people create." Google slaps advertisements on their search pages, which link to content that other people create. Google offers up a number of tools to allow people to avoid Google links to their content. What's happening here is that they want Google to pay them money because Google is making money. However, here's the thing. Since the actual content is still on their servers, if someone wants to actually view the content, they have to go to the non-Google servers. People are welcome to put advertisements there.
Google should tell the French media that Google will be happy to pay a share of advertising revenues to the content holders as soon as the content holders pay Google for linking to their content. Until then, they're delisted. Who needs whom more?
Your marginalizing of Google's role in driving traffic to these websites and making it possible for user's to find content suggests that you have no background in - or even passing familiarity with - the field of information retrieval. Google provides a service, of real value, with very real technical merit, and profits off of that by placing ads on the results page. They are not appropriating content for this beyond that necessary to allow a user to decide whether or not a search result is relevant. Meanwhile, these French news outlets benefit from billions of click-throughs and anyone searching for French-language news benefits from being able to find it quickly. And of course neither the users nor the listed web sites have to pay a penny for this service. There is a good reason these nuts are alone in challenging this business model. Referrals from Google probably make up a huge portion of their web traffic, while searches for French news probably contribute a small fraction of 1% to Google's ad revenue. Let's see how the fallout from this fight affects each party.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
remove French news paper content. Seriously just set up a donate link.... WE NEED TO SEE THIS. I got plenty of beer, dope and popcorn ready....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Google's Biz Model is to slap advertisements on content that other people create. Google makes a stink ton of money doing this.
And some are just plain green with envy that Google's business model is more-or-less working and theirs hasn't really done so for a while now. This isn't about creator's rights, this is playground-like cries of "not fair!".
Since the first news papers media outlets have taken freely available information then charged for it and wrapped adverts around it in order to pay for the distribution of that information (and making a profit too). Now someone else is playing their game and playing it better than them they are crying foul. Google's adverts are no more wrong then their adverts, issue prices or subscription costs: in both cases someone is profiting from the act of making information easier to access for those who pay (which to my mind is fair enough in both cases).
Just because Google has *indexed* the content doesn't some how give them the right to profit from that content (as they do)
Are you suggesting that they do all that work indexing the content and giving you easy access to it for free? They aren't a charity you know.
Are you saying that news papers should not carry adverts either? Or charge for each issue more than cost price for manufacture and distribution? After all, all they've done is collate a bunch of information and by the same argument that doesn't give them the right to expect to profit from it.
and not give the creators a cut. Google does not want to cut the creators a share of the money that Google earns by appropriating that original content.
With words like "appropriate" you talk like they are pulling a FunnyJunk and taking all the content, deliberately removing attribution & all other links to the original. Google present the headline and perhaps the first sentence or so, along with where they go the news from and a full link to the originating site.
As usual they'll scream about it "breaking the internet" - but paying creators part of the profit that Google makes from indexing the content that other people generated really does is break Google's biz model.
Even if it doesn't break the Internet, it is completely unnecessary and will just add complication and therefore cost. If the news outlets don't want Google to use their content in the manner that Google uses content then they should just ask to be de-listed, or use the facility that already exists in robots.txt to tell Google not to index the content that they wish to keep for themselves. Problem solved. The thing is, this is not what they want: they want to be in Google's index but on their terms, terms that would help them perpetuate their out-of-date business model.
If only there was some way to nicely ask Google not to use a page that the content providers could use.
There's no french money, there's only european money.
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2145882/How-tell-euro-note-comes--German-doesnt-beat-Greek.html
If the number of the euro note has a "U" in front, it's French euro.
Example:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/05/17/article-0-13243611000005DC-4_468x286.jpg
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Seasoned with a hefty helping of nationalism ?
Just because Google has *indexed* the content doesn't some how give them the right to profit from that content (as they do) and not give the creators a cut.
Why not? The content creators are providing the content for free.
And what about the content creators? shouldn't they give part of their profits to google, who provides free search services for them, driving more readers to their sites and thus increasing their profits?
Excuse me, but that's so freaking stupid, that blows all scales of measurement. What do these guys think, how will anyone find their content, if it won't be accessible by search engines? Do they want to go back to pre-search engine times with sites aggregating content sites into categories like a phone book? Go, bury yourselves under a rock and stay there.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Either way, this is a very difficult case to call either way, there's far more to it then meets the eye on the first glance. Both sides have very compelling arguments to bring to the table.
I dont' realy see what's difficult about this case. are you suggesting, that google should part with some of it's earnings just becouse he earns too much?
I understand that news creators have it somehow difficult, selling content in on-line environment, where everyone is used to get it for free is indeed serious problem. But the proposed law won't solve anything. On the opposite - it will make the situation for the content creators worse, becaouse google will just stop indexing them at all and number of their readers will drop. It would maybe work if the law forced google to index the content and pay for it as well but i don't think that would be constitutional.
Also, remember that the content creators are offering the content for free. If google stopped making aggregated newd feeds from it, users would just use client side news aggregators (RSS readers).
Robots.txt only removes links to their content. I think they want to opt out while making sure everyone else is opted out as well so that Google doesn't send traffic to their competition instead.
A moronic law like this would achieve just that.
I call bullshit. Google doesn't "slap advertisements on content that other people create." Google slaps advertisements on their search pages, which link to content that other people create.
But there's a grey area when the title and excerpt displayed on the search result is a near enough substitute for visiting the actual site. Content like dictionary definitions, simple general knowledge questions, weather, times, and yes, news stories. I can often get a gist of the state of the news by only reading the Google News page, without the need for any click through to one of the sources.
We don't want to end up with all headlines becoming teasers: "Surprise as Celebrity Arrested".
You dream of being as out of money as the french.. TICK TOCK - http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Screw the french fries, they're Belgian !
The problem with this is that it creates a new barrier to entry that wasn't there before. If prior to this I wanted to set up a French language news aggregator site, it wouldn't cost me much more than the hosting, the spidering and the other regular overheads of running a website all of which I could recoup by selling ads. However with this law in place I'd have to spend a lot of time and money making sure the news sites got paid. It means you can't set up a French news aggregator without some serious startup capital.
My my ... what an ass. Freedom fries might make you sumfatass.
Go to France with francs bills or coins in your pocket. Try to buy something. Look like an ignorant ass.
Google shows a summary of the article, as well as images used by the article. This could in theory be enough to to get the gist of a story and to prevent the user from visiting the page.
When you're doing wholesale site rips, displaying content from each page for your own users, it becomes less clearcut that it's fair use or moral.
Are you saying you like Big Butts?
The question isn't so much as if their business model is good. The question is if their business model is legal or ethical. After all, robbing someone's house is a great business model in terms of making money.
News outlets may often rely on news feeds for stories but they still largely write their own analysis of it, often adding additional information (quotes, explanations, history of a story etc.). Just because it may be written referring to a feed or a story another paper broke doesn't stop it being original content, just like an essay written about a book is still original content or a scientific study based on public data (for example a population study based on census data) is original content.
The French media (along with Murdock in the US) have to realise that this is just a configuration problem on their end. The HTTP protocol has clearly defined how things work. Search engines can do an HTTP request to request content, but first have to read the site's robots.txt and adhere to the rules contained within it. If someone doesn't want Google indexing their content, just setup a rule in the robots.txt and I am sure that Google will properly remove it from their indexes. No lawsuits, laws, or even threatening letters needed.
Perhaps Google should send them all a how-to on configuring robots.txt?
What is the name of that strange beast that runs in ever decreasing circles until it runs up it's own backside, from which safe retreat it hurls abuse and calumny upon it's enemies...Is it a French beast?
They'll end up liking the taste of crow. Idiots. Without search engines, the online content will never be found, shrivel up, and die. It's a symbiotic relationship and punishing one side is just going to hurt the other.
A child can understand that concept.
I think you're missing the point. It's all well and good saying sites will "shrivel up and die" without search engine results, but right not they're shrivelling up an dieing due to a lack of money. Google isn't just a search engine it's the "front page" to most people's internet. It's undermined the "stickiness" of everyone else's site, making it very difficult for individual sites to survive on ad revenue.
Google isn't "symbiotic", it's "parasitic", because while it appears to offer short-term benefits, it devalues individual sites (especially news sites) and destroys brand loyalty (I personally read stories from 5 different news sites this morning thanks to Google News -- good for me, bad for the news sites).
Sites don't earn money on eyeballs alone, you know....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
They'll end up liking the taste of crow. Idiots. Without search engines, the online content will never be found, shrivel up, and die. It's a symbiotic relationship and punishing one side is just going to hurt the other.
A child can understand that concept.
Don't tell Rupert Murdoch that.
Fairy nuf. But their business model WRT news is identical to the business model of the people that are moaning about is: take freely available information, and make money by collating it and making it available in a way that people find useful.
What Google do to on the "collating the information" front is a bit different, but the core model is the same. The editorialising that papers and such do is part of their collating effort but is something that Google do not need to do directly: they provide that service by also having a search engine that can check other resources in easy reach (they don't need to add a map of the middle east in a story about territorial arguments in order to give me more context within which to understand the information as I can just look it up if I need it, which I can necessarily do while reading a paper on the train). The "making available" part is different too, but again just because of the different medium.
Despite those differences the base model is the same: take, collate, make available, profit. They are complaining about someone else using their business model but somehow making it work better.
You are not wrong that editorial content can be considered new material, or at least a new derived work, but if they don't want indexing sites to index that material all they have to do is use facilities already available to stop indexing sites indexing that material. You don't need new legislation to stop Google indexing your content if you don't want them too, and if you do want them to index your content (because people might not find it otherwise) you can't demand that Google pay you for providing free links to it any more than I can demand the local telephone directory pays me for including my name/address/number.
In that case they can just add a simple robots,txt to tell the "parasite" to go away. And then start waving their fucking magic wand around to make people discover the site directly.
Paying in Francs works very well around Switzerland and not just close by either, Swiss Francs are easily used in Lyon. Who's the ignorant ass now?
What, it's not fair bringing up Swiss Francs? Too bad, you needed to be more precise. Besides, which, the Swiss are not the only ones to continue using money called Francs.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
The first sentence isn't a "wholesale site rip". If that's all the article offered, then they weren't really offering anything of value, were they?
It's a balance between getting enough information to interest the user and little enough information that the user wants more. Should Google only be allowed to show headlines? Our news services would descend into chaos of ambiguous headlines then.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Sure, you can get the gist of it. But if you want to know any details, you need to click on the links. If Google showed less detail, I know I wouldn't be clicking on more links. I'd probably just not bother with news sites as much because they are so badly organised.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Google isn't "symbiotic", it's "parasitic"
Just like the bacteria in your gut. Go a head, take a ton of antibiotics and see how well that goes.
If a title and excerpt is enough to get the whole story the journalist is a lazy sod who needs to write more.
Is this a joke? People go to great lengths to be in Google's search results, and these idiots want the opposite? I suggest Google remove them altogether from the search engine. Why stop there? Remove their servers from the DNS, disconnect them from the ISP, and unplug the servers. Because if they don't want their information shared, they shouldn't put it in a public place where information is shared. Stupid ignorant trolls.
Google is not a monopoly. There are shed-loads of search engines and news aggregators out there, Google is just the biggest and most popular. Search is the main service provided, and sites are free to block it if they do not want to show up in search results but instead rely on the off chance that someone types their address into the adress bar.
If I have a concert venue and people drive there by car, then gas stations profit from my shows. Would it make sense for me to demand a share in these profits?
Just out of curiosity, why exactly do you think that France is going after the ad money? Because the majority of search engines belong to America. They had one approach on how to do it, but decided that it hurt their small businesses so decided not to do that. IOW, France is looking at a way to help their press (illegally, by WTO treaty) by going after American companies money. That is pure nationalism.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For local news here in Belgium, google news lists headlines with summaries of different articles very often for instance. Often the articles it lists are all about the same event/news from different sources. I personally gave up on google news, since it is always lagging behind, and just doesn't have any added value over just going to the website of the local paper or news service. Same goes for international news for me.
It does not matter, what with everyone having those amoral ad blockers installed in their browsers anyway...
Google has the lions share of the market, but its market share for searchs as of September 2012 is 65%.... this is at minimum 15% shy of anyone being able to scream Monopoly!
What Google is doing here right now is saying out loud and directed at some idiot French government officials what EVERY search engine will do if this comes to pass.
The only people that will try to get this enforced are the old entrenched newspapers and their sites, and this will only bring about their downfall even faster, so bring it on!
The problem is that media dinosaurs are thrashing in their death throes and lashing out at anything that gets within reach.
They should drop those that have paywalls. They are the ones pushing that law. The ones without paywalls are obviously making it work. But once the paywall holders realize that Google is their friend, then they will stop French politicians.
BTW, it should not be just google. It should be google and bing (which includes yahoo). Even a day of that, possibly a week, would let the french media know that these search engines HELP them, not hurt them.
Besides their real problem is that they had a monopoly. Now, they have competition. If they want to make loads of money, they will simply have to be the best there is. That does not mean just delivering news, but at designing websties that are useful that local citizens can not do without.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When you put it that way, it almost seems like an act of war. Given that it is France, U.S. should oblige and land some troops. Should all be over in a matter of minutes and we'll have their unconditional surrender and this silly law will disappear.
I'll take the opposing side as a thought experiment, because there is actually a point in there, This is not my real opinion on this topic. My real opinion is if the French do this, then Google will have to filter French sites just as a business decision.
OK so people who write for a living need to be compensated. If Google makes everything free, then what are they going to do? France is a place that takes great steps to guard its culture against the deprivations of "the market". They directly finance, to a certain extent, their musicians for instance. In France, you might be a street musician paid by the state. It's just like the discussion the other day about astronomy in the US and who pays for it; some things just would not exist if they relied on the market to produce them. Those things are public goods and they need to be supported collectively.
So this nation that pays musicians to muse has their writers decrying the give-away of their labor by Google. There IS a sense in which that's stealing. It's theirs, Google took it and gave it away without their permission. I am not saying it's the only way to interpret that state of affairs, but it's not prima fascia a crazy interpretation.
The French thinking here is not without real interest. They are essentially trying to impose a form of micropayments on Google. If a vision of the web and Google had been co-designed by all concerned parties from the start, this likely would have been the deal. But Google and like search engines just "happened" to everyone and has come to be seen by most people as a kind of force of nature, a natural fact about the web that it's useless to work against.
The French don't buy into the whole idea that the average person should think of herself as a helpless, passive recipient of some big, non-human market "forces" .. They keep in the forefront of their minds the fact that people are behind companies and laws govern people. We could go for a little more of that thinking over here.
This idea, if Google were forced to live by it, would really tank Google as we know it. Their business model would not survive in its present form. But Craigslist tanked newspapers in their present form- they were 80-90% reliant on their classifieds for revenue.So business models fail when things change ; that would extend even unto Google itself. That's a completely valid way to look at things.
The difference is that some people accept it when business models are the ones inflicting the change, no matter how radical- i.e. Google and Craigslist, but not when laws and legislatures try the same thing- that's Communism ! But attempting to enforce copyright law is not a form of Communism. It's just the opposite, it's capitalism, errr.. right?
Google's moral - economic argument goes something like this- our search engine provides you, the author, with a form of free, worldwide PR for your brand and the ability to generate revenue by running ads on your site. We are therefore a net benefit to you the copyright holder. Of course the benefit to society is not in question and the more information there is out there, the more productive and innovative people will be and a rising society lifts all boats, it's just that some people in society like to sink other people's boats.
But the same moral-economic argument can be made right back to Google. By paying us, the copyright holders, you're distributing Google money to the value -producing agents that provide first rate content for the web in the first place. By making the web worthwhile, we provide you with a huge world wide advertising venue and the opportunity to charge advertisers a fee. The money you give to us we spend and that stimulates economic activity the world over as goods and services chase all these dollars that are now being distributed more evenly.
The idea of compensating authors and copyright holders in micro amounts for micro contributions is interesting. But that's not the way we'r
ok "european money" isn't the ideal way to reference the euro but the key fact is correct. There is no longer "french money" in the sense of money issued under control of the french government. Euros are issued under the authority of the ECB which in turn gets it's authority from the EU. As such it would take most of the EU cooperating to change it's behaviour. If france were to unilatterally start issuing euros outside the framework controlled by the ECB the result would not be pretty. At the very least I would expect such an action to cause total breakup of the EU and possiblly outright war.
Goverment debt in a government's own currency and owed to an central bank that exists at the pleasure of said government is basically just an accounting fiction**. Government debt in a governments own currency but owed to third parties is more real but can still be quickly eliminated if desired by issuing new currency*** to pay it off. Government debt denominated in a foreign-controlled currency is far more real than either as the greeks are finding out at the moment.
* Which afaict is "keep inflation low whatever the cost"
** That is "borrow from your own central bank and spend" is equivilent to "print and spend".
*** This currency may be either physical or virtual though in the modern world it's likely to be mostly virtual.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Google is making money off information they don't have to pay for!?!? I'm outraged. The news outlets have to pay for all the information they get, don't they? Wait. They don't have to pay someone every time they take their picture? Or, any time they use some piece of information that is publicly available?
Salted with the tears of a bald eagle. Deepfried in light sweet crude.
Screw the french fries, they're Belgian !
I have always wondered how the Belgians felt about our labeling their dish as "French fries"? If I was Belgian I kind of think that would annoy me.
The "French" part comes the type of cut of the potato. French cut: sliced lengthwise into long, thin strips.
don't think there are laws that could force Google do business with anybody
If Google is declared a monopoly in one area (search) they can have their business practices in other areas restricted. As a nation, France could ban all of Google from all of France. If Google pulls out of France, would France be able to force their hand with regards to all of Europe via the EU?
Add to the fact that it's near impossible to fire someone there. My large company merged with a French telecom (we are now hq there). We need to cut jobs in order to stay profitable. The number of hoops to jump through, let alone pressure from the government has kept most of the French jobs. Talk about nationalism. Unions only wish they were as strong in the US as they are in France. France has 3/4 of what the whole of the US has so far as our jobs, but those US jobs support a much bigger market and much of the int'l as well.
So, the internet would be a pretty lame place if it didn't have search giants like Google, Bing and Yahoo pulling the content of the internet together into an index that you can search. Yes, there are ways to get your website known without search engines. People learned about new sites by word of mouth for the most part early on. People would commonly put links to sites that they had found useful on their personal web pages. Then places like yahoo started to pop up aggregating links on a larger scale. This all eventually lead to search engines that provide nearly real time results with fairly high accuracy. This has increased the pace of information dissemination via the internet by many orders of magnitude. It has helped the internet become the information superhighway that we have today. In fact, I would say big search engines are THE reason we have a thriving internet today. I have little doubt the world wide web would be a floundering niche that few, in any, news companies would spend any time or money utilizing if it wasn't for big search engines. Let's compare how much money one of those french news sites spends creating the content they create to the money Google spends making sure that as you type each letter you instantly see hundreds of results matching what you've entered INCLUDING news released minutes ago. I'm sorry, but to me, Google provides a far more critical side to the symbiotic relationship, even if the content side could exist without it.
This move is typical of governments. They have no idea what the actual implecations will be until inacted. Once put in place the politicians scratch their heads saying "I didn't sign on for this!"
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I have always wondered how the Belgians felt about our labeling their dish as "French fries"? If I was Belgian I kind of think that would annoy me.
Yes, but we gave them the credit for those big waffles, so it's all good.
The issue is that serious news gathering, in the old way, is expensive. Keeping a network of reporters distributed round the world in places where news events are liable to happen costs money. Good newspapers have this network by legacy and tradition. They still see value in the networks. So they want to keep them. But as disruptive technologies like Twitter affect the way people consume news, the number of eyeballs on the output produced by those expensive journalistic networks is declining. Because the number of eyeballs is declining, and because other opportunities for advertising are becoming available, the amount that advertisers are prepared to pay for adverts on the 'newspaper' sites is declining. This has precisely nothing to do with search, and it has to do with Google only because Google has made itself a significant platform for advertising. It has to do, fundamentally, with audience share.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Exactly. The argument seems to me to be in favor of fostering a monopoly in news sites. It's a concerted effort to keep the small news site from taking readers away from big news sites.
"Brand loyalty" is only beneficial to a company with an inferior product - in this case, that'd be poor or inaccurate reporting. Seeing, say, MSNBC, the NYT and Fox side by side only hurts Fox. There is no good reason for regulators to protect an inferior product from market forces.
Google having to pay a portion of ad revenue for linking to news sites is like newsstands having to pay a portion of their cigarette and snack sales for having newspapers on their shelves, and allowing people to skim the front pages for free.
In that case they can just add a simple robots,txt to tell the "parasite" to go away. And then start waving their fucking magic wand around to make people discover the site directly.
Because they don't want their sites excluded, they want to force some other company (google) to pay them money for the content since actual readers refuse to do it.
I would love to see newspapers get what they ask for, and watch their Web traffic sink to nearly zero.
they after some warmup verbiage said THOSE EXACT WORDS
which of course takes 1 Being able to prove you are RIGHT 2 Testicles that resemble above average sized Coconuts 3 Not wanting to be diplomatic AT ALL
personally i think any attempt to access French Media via a google search should result in an error message that implies (in a court friendly manner) that the information is 1 Known to be Wrong 2 Pirated 3 otherwise contaminated
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Arguable statements? It's pretty well established now that free newspaper sites are failing. They do not earn their keep. It is a known fact, a done deal.
If a site's traffic is not generating sufficient revenue to pay it's bills, then operating a website site is not a viable business model. Sometimes that's OK, as the site is not the revenue generating arm of the business, but more of a promotional expense. If a business model does not work, you change the business model.
Who said "lots of money"? I'm talking adequate money. And as for constructive proposals... how about the RTFA...?
It is a pretty short article. nearly half of it is quoted in the summary above. What is not quoted doesn't include any constructive ideas. "Gimme!" is really not a constructive idea.
Pay the content providers a cut of advertising revenue for providing the content that makes Google News the most visited news site on the planet.
Google (as a search provider) has the data to determine which links are (or are statistically likely to become) popular, and provides aggregated lists (such as their news page) as starting points for people to find content without having to actually run a search query for "things I might be interested in". Google then sells advertizing space on their site, but the greater value still lies in the data they collect about people using their services -it allows them to develop new services that people will want to use (thus generating even more data for them) and sells access to portions of that data to others. It is the selling of distilled portions of this data that makes Google money.
As for requiring a share of these revenues in exchange for allowing Google to include links to a site's content in an aggregated list. I don't believe it is legally valid under current international business practices. Further I do not expect Google to agree under any circumstances. It is a line in the sand for them, beyond which lies the slippery slope of every website being paid to have their content indexed/aggregated by search providers, or indeed being paid by anyone who indirectly makes use of their sites existence as part of their own business! It would spell the end for companies that live on "the Google method" (i.e. providing services to users in exchange for collecting data about what they do with those services, and then selling the results of that market research data.)
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
No matter what the media or the government decide, there is no scenario where the media comes out ahead in this deal.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I would start charging French media sites for all click throughs to their website.
If they did not pay, they would not get indexed in the future.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I suspect, should Google follow through, the French would turn from traditional media to Twitter and aggregators in such numbers and with such persistence as to gravely damage traditional media's prospects.
I get most of my news now from social media sites and from recent memory the most accurate reports are from mob sourcing data as it happens. I don't watch anything from big media now, because it is a product and not actually news. I could careless what the "network of reporters" is doing to push their corp agenda.
In that case they can just add a simple robots,txt to tell the "parasite" to go away. And then start waving their fucking magic wand around to make people discover the site directly.
Because they don't want their sites excluded, they want to force some other company (google) to pay them money for the content since actual readers refuse to do it.
But Google can refuse to show their content if the options are either pay for crawling it and not to crawl it.
Of course, I wouldn't put it past legislators to force Google to crawl and pay.
The French government obviously has it backwards. Instead of making new law and all that shit, they should get google to stop dodging taxes with the double dutch.
There is plenty of money that can be had that way. Then they can share it with newspapers or whatever.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
And France has universal healthcare and a life expectancy 3 years higher than the US.
And about the same unemployment rate.
Firing people isn't all what's important in life...
Forgot source:
http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+France+vs+us&x=0&y=0
And yes, the suggested law is beyond stupid as it is in Germany.
I don't understand. If "gets lots of hits" causes "make no money" then wouldn't the sites hurt just as much, if no Google existed? Or wouldn't they be hurting just as much, if Google were heavily regulated?
If "get lots of hits" means "make no money" then can you imagine any possible scenario where they do make money? And if so, won't that scenario work with search referrals working as they currently do?
I totally get that it's hard to make money posting news to the web, but I'm missing how Google is somehow responsible for it being hard, unless you're talking about the landscape being so amazingly competitive due to Google helping people find competitors.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Exactly. I think it is only the Americans who use the term "French fries" to refer to chips in general. I don't know about Belgium but in the Netherlands where we speak the same language we call the thin, long chips "Franse frieten" which means exactly the same. We also refer to "Vlaamse frieten" (Vlamingen is the Dutch speaking part of Belgium) but they are the opposite from French fries, instead of being long and thin they are medium length and much thicker than regular fries. To complicate matters even further we refer to chips/fries as "patat" in the Netherlands which is the Belgian word for potato.
The French newspapers seem to be forgetting that Google provides them with a valuable service. If it weren't for Google, no one would know that the newspaper had the content in question. Sure, the user can directly type in the URI of the newspaper to get there and see if they have the content, but they can do this regardless of Google indexing them or not.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
But Google can refuse to show their content if the options are either pay for crawling it and not to crawl it.
I think that IS what is on the table. Google has come out and said they weren't going to pay and therefore were going to exclude the sites.
How about French Media pay Google to be included in any search results? This could also work for the MAFFIA. Unless they pay Google to be included in search results, no movie or song promotion would be listed.
Just because I can phone anyone legally does not mean that I can legally write a program that will phone everyone.
And just because I can summarize an article, providing the necessary citations, does not mean that I can legally write a program to summarize all of wikipedia and then post that online with advertizing.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
First I agree with you that the issue is easily solved with robots.txt and that as far as the practical aspects of this matter go, that's all need be said no this topic.
You said (numbers added) :
1) Since the first news papers media outlets have taken freely available information then charged for it and wrapped adverts around it in order to pay for the distribution of that information (and making a profit too).
(2)Now someone else is playing their game and playing it better than them they are crying foul.
3)Google's adverts are no more wrong then their adverts, issue prices or subscription costs: in both cases someone is profiting from the act of making information easier to access for those who pay (which to my mind is fair enough in both cases).
1 is a mischaracterization of what they are doing the way it is a mischaracterization to say someone who writes a physics textbook is largely just taking facts about the world , adding graphics and layout and charging a lot for it. That much is obvious about authors and analysts.
Publishers ALSO perform very many useful services including finding and paying authors, deciding what to publish in the first place and basically acting as a time-saving sieve through which the world's candidate stories authors and events pass. They are judged on their ability to do this. Think how useless FoxNews and The New Of The World are. Lotta value add work goes in with publishers also.
2) Without 1 being true, 2 is not true either .
3) Is true, but doesn't in any way support your point that their business models are somehow equivalent. They aren't , they're different. What they are BOTH doing , (and in this they are the same with every other viable business model ) is processing raw material , in this case information, and adding value through that processing. Google is a post processor to newspapers in this matter (in other matters they are a post processor to links and a million other things they keep statistics on), but that doesn't mean that newspapers aren't adding value that needs to be compensated.
Not trying to be too critical here, the essential spirit of "suck it up publishers and adapt!" is I think the ultimately the right one, but neither I nor anyone else has yet proved it to be the right one and everyone who thinks this may just be wrong.
Cheers!
For Americans:
French Fries are long, thin, and mostly rectangular. Like these: http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/what-are-french-fries.htm
Crinkle cut french fries are like normal french fries with a zigzag edge. Like these: http://laughingsquid.com/crinkle-cut-french-fry-shaped-cakes-with-raspberry-ketchup/
Potato Wedges are shorter, fatter, and wedge shaped. Like these: http://americanfood.about.com/od/potatosidedishrecipes/r/Potato_Wedges_Recipe.htm
Potato Chips are fried completely throughout, flat and wide, more like fried potato shavings. Like these:http://www.kettlebrand.com/our_products/#/our_products/?pid=3
Hope that helps
Google privacy policies are not welcome in Europe as well as most other civilized countries. Europe will make sure Google can only index junk and remove its user base from this business. Google also has major competitors outside of the English speaking world. They lost to their competition in pretty much all other languages to companies that respect privacy.
Buggy whip makers be damned. We're not talking about bloggers, or citizen journalists, or crowd-sourced reports of view-from-the-streets of the Arab Spring -- Google News sources its feed from reputable professional outfits, and builds an entire service out of them. Google News has no adverts: why? Because they know they'd get hammered for it -- the news outlets made that clear enough early on.
And yet no-one arguing against me (including those that modded me "flamebait" stopped to point that out -- it's the natural counterargument, but no-one made it.
However, lots of people don't go to Google News directly -- they go to the Google front page, search for something they know is in the news and the news results are embedded in the general results... along with adverts. There are less of them, and they're only at the bottom, but they're there.
Google already knows they're treading on thin ice -- they've positioned themselves very carefully in anticipation of something like this happening, because it was always going to happen sooner or later. They're going to argue they're not making any money from the service, because it's free and (nearly) ad-free. The French are going to argue indirect profit due to customer draw.
I can't really say who's right here.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
This has nothing to do with USA, but with EU. Google has a physical presence (offices with employees) in Ireland, UK and Switzerland, which are all on the list of tax friendly countries. France is pretending that what counts is where the content is delivered (eg: the viewer of the add is in France), but the problem is that the general laws in Europe about delivery of a service tend to make you believe that it depends more on where the servers are located, or eventually where the employees are. So if Google wants they can bring this mater to the European courts, and rightly, IMO.
"making it very difficult for individual sites to survive on ad revenue."
Damnation! If only there were another way to profit from the production of a good, other than to give it away for free and put an ad on it! Oh, humanity, why is there no other model for monetizing a useful product? How long must we suffer without any way to, say, directly trade the useful product for an exchangeable unit of value! Lo, we should pray that someday somebody invents the economic concept of "buying things"! Until then, yes, we must make sure that people can make money from ads!
I'd rather expect a classy: "Oh, merde...!" (spoken with a Patrick Steward accent).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The readers refuse by using ad blockers. Can the newspaper sites hinder ad blockers? Probably not reliably.
That should teach them against hiring people except as a last resort
You're making a major error in listing the basics of your reasoning. Very few large content creators offer content for free on the web. Most of it is paid by advertisers.
Just because you're not the one paying doesn't make it free.
Terrible argument which, among other things, would suggest that microsoft isn't monopoly either as there are "shed-load of operating systems and productivity suites out there". It is, a convicted one at that, because monopoly isn't about not having competition. It's about dominating all competition to the point where you can dictate the rules of the market regardless of other competitors, which is exactly what google is doing.
Because you're asking them to make it better than Google. There isn't one website in the world that is better than Google, and you're asking every site to be better than Google. And Google is that good because it offers practically zero original content, so how the heck does a content provider compete with Google?
If providing no content is better than providing some content, clearly you'll need to solve the negative content problem to be better than Google. Demonstration of this is left as a exercise for the reader.
The issue is that serious news gathering, in the old way, is expensive. Keeping a network of reporters distributed round the world in places where news events are liable to happen costs money.
I'd like to expand upon this point, many news organizations don't do expensive journalism. They use news stories from the wire (Associated Press) and unlike a newspaper, a news wire organization does not have its own product. Nearly every newspaper across the world is a member of the Associated Press. The AP, like Reuters and other wire services, supplies stories, photographs and photos to newspapers. Most newspapers can't afford to send reporter(s) overseas to cover a war or an economic summit, however the AP has employees who do just that. For most newspapers, the news wire is the "official" source. Nothing is "official" until AP or another news wire picks up the story.
In a nutshell: The wire reporter covers an event and writes about it, then story is filed and edited. After that, it is submitted (electronically) to member newspapers, who choose to print the story or not. The process also works in reverse. For example a reporter for a local newspaper covers an interesting event and sends it to AP, where the story is picked up and possibly sent to the national wire. Local television stations work their news in much the same way. Because a news wire reporter works for his organization and not for a particular newspaper, his coverage is considered more unbiased than a local reporter's coverage.
But as disruptive technologies like Twitter affect the way people consume news, the number of eyeballs on the output produced by those expensive journalistic networks is declining.
Disruptive to established players of an older medium, perhaps? Twitter redefines the roles of publishers, much like blogging, and even YouTube. Why don't we just say the Internet? The Internet enables anyone to become a publisher. Regardless of the medium shouldn't this underline the value of quality content? There are good blogs and bad blogs (referring to informative quality) on a variety of topics. This leads into another point, value. For many price is the single biggest motivating factor in a purchase decision. Price is not the end all be all, but look at cheap import products for a physical analogy. Quality exists but it is at a premium. For many the cheap goods fulfill the role adequately. Conversely there are subscription services available which cater to different audiences much like "expensive" niche goods.
Perhaps the dissatisfaction of paying subscribers or even visitors to traditional news sites is due to people being turned off by bias and agendas which is represented as quality journalism? The demographic which only has a computer at work is shrinking. More eyeballs than ever are coming online everyday with mobile devices. Eyeballs are good, conversions into sales are even better. Besides simply getting the word out Advertisers make money for their clients by bringing in business, this means (typically) understanding your market and knowing where to reach the buyers. Advertising networks deal with market segments, so it's not like everyone deals with the papers/magazines/sites directly.
For example let's take Facebook which has many eyeballs and a company with lots of money, General Motors. They're not as inept as you might believe, GM Spends $1.8 Billion USD annually on advertising. According to GM Facebook's user base doesn't seem to be that interested in buying cars from advertisements. Conversely, look at how effective Amazon is, especially with regards to related products (targeted advertisements).
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Google has the right to make the money because it is completely in the control of content creators if their content shows up in google search. You can include a file on your website called robot.txt that can tell Google not to include your site. Google isn't taking anything. People are giving Google this content of their own free will.
That's the way news is going in general these days. The old way of news gathering is, indeed, old; an outdated 20th-century concept that's increasingly becoming unsustainable. Propaganda is something people will happily pay to do, so the old way will continue regardless of profitability... but that doesn't stop the old guard from wishing they could get still paid to propagandize.
Fine. You still have the option to block Google from your site if you like, just like you'd block any other robot from snatching your content. You do not, however, get the option to charge Google for looking at your content; if you'd rather Google not look at it, it'll simply do that, rather than pay.
France could nationaize web search. They could create their own web crawler. Then they could pass a law making it illegal for any other web crawler to index content located on servers in France. They could then license the index out to search engines. Note this is a terrible idea. Socialism is bad bad thing.
...get lots of hits, make no money.....
Get off the web now. You have not read the owner's manual.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So Google males money by selling advertising on a site that provides links to other sites that can then gain revenue by selling advertising on their site. Now they want to charge Google for listing their site? What's next? Charging to link sites? Not a far step considering that a search result is just a list of links.
Simple ask google to delist your site. What's that you say? They send you most of your traffic? Oh so they promote your website to allow people to find it for free. But that's not adequate you want them to pay you to promote your site for free.
Sure makes sense.
Let Google simply stop showing any search results for these sites. I'd like to see how long they last before they stop acting like fools.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
for tech companies, generally speaking, it was the number tossed around during the Microsoft inquisition. MS is still above this number but they've (apparently) been forced to play nice somehow.
Microsoft is the only precedence for the tech sector, and as such would likely be referenced heavily.
Apples and oranges time again I see, so: pointless. That said, if French sites want to start charging for Google's news aggregation then of course Google should have the option of declining that "purchase" by not indexing that content.
Just like I have a right to decline to pay levies on blank media or watching TV? Sorry, doesn't work that way. If a levy is legally mandated, you pay or you leave the country completely.
That's what the French argument is about.
You will need blank media if you want to record anything. In many countries, you pay levy on TV regardless of anything else, other then your physical presence in the country. Same for owning a car in an area where you really won't be able to manage without a car.
Welcome to reality.
First, lets figure out what kind of money Google makes on news. Go to news.google.com. Hmm... no ads. Now search for a news item. Right now, I see Franki Valli is highly trending on Google. Thats as commercial a search term as I can think of, since the reason the old guy with the squeaky voice is on is because of a revival on Broadway. So, I search for it... and... wait for it - no ads. Of course, on other terms, YMMV - but there appears to not be enough money being made to pay for the bandwidth. Now, clearly, to be the search engine of choice, you want to be able to index and respond to queries about everything - at least, anything available. But if Google turns off indexing of French news sites, then they are going to lose *almost nothing* and probably cut net costs marginally. at least in the short term. Even better for Google, and a few media companies - and possibly inevitable (?) - is if Google cuts deals with some French media so that those media sites would refund to Google any cost that Google had to pay the French Govt. Hell, double that cost and charge them that. If I owned a small French media company, I would sign up for that in a heartbeat... and watch the dominant search engine send all the traffic my way, raise my advertising rates, and send the old guard French media out of business. Also, for Google, this would ensure they had the breadth of coverage of topics they need... and another source of revenue of Google.
Interesting definition of 'hold you to ransom' you've got there, when it's France trying to extort money from Google, and not the other way around.
Is there a mandate that search engines must index everything? If I don't want to pay the levy for watching TV I just avoid having a TV. What is it with this "leave the country" nonsense? You decline to pay a levy on blank DVDs by not buying them. Google does not need to index these sites, your need for blank media is apparently greater though.
I live in a country where TVs have a yearly fee, but I assure you that physical presence is not sufficient: you also need to have a TV. People without one do not pay. Why should they?
u in honor is honour, as neighbour, as colour, etc
American English spelling did not lie to conform to Canadian, Australian, British or International English.
I just go with the flow. When I write to people outside of the USA, I add the missing letters.m
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
woosh.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Same reason you pay any other tax. Because government made a budget and such payments are required by law. Around here, starting next year you do not need TV to be required to pay that particular tax.
uhum, thats where the EU anti trust inquiry comes in, more money is needed for champagne and backpatting. ... did i dream about this metatag that excludes pages from being indexed by robots ? if you dont want it to appear you can just add that? Did i dream that?
"The question is whether by returning a search result Google is infringing the copyright of a site."
will they be sueing yahoo and bing as well ? startpage? duckduckgo ? who else? crisis is gaining momentum at last, desperate measures, i think the worst has yet to come
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
nothing is belgian, not even belgians, half the world came unload their genes here, the country was devised on paper as a gift from the queen to her cousin (or uncle?) and probably as a bufferzone between the french and the dutch.
nothing is belgian
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?