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.'"

Comments

Easy solution french media

[Anonymous Coward]

Just put a complete paywall up over your news. Then you don't have to worry about anyone ever reading it again.

Re:Easy solution french media

[toutankh]

Actually good independent newspapers exist in France and some of them do a great work. The best example is "Le Canard Enchaîné", which has existed for almost a century. Although self-qualified "satyrical", this weekly is at the origin of many scandals in France in the past century. The journalists do amazing investigations, you won't see ads on any page (to ensure independence), it cannot be read electronically (although there is a website including a poor-quality version of the front page). And guess what, people are willing to pay for a paper version with no ads and quality content. They release accounts and balance every year, and unlike every mainstream newspaper using tons of ads and an electronic version, the balance is positive every year.

By the way, politicians are afraid of it, too. I'm not sure there are equivalents in other countries in fact, but maybe someone could enlighten me. For instance, how many national newspapers with 0 ads can you find in the USA?

Re:Easy solution french media

[Extreme_biker0]

In the UK there is Private Eye which sound very similar; satirical with good journalism, and often the source of nationwide scandals.

careful what you wish for

[Crypto Gnome]

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".

Re:careful what you wish for

[GrpA]

No, a better idea would be to still have them, except when you click on the link, it takes you to a page where it asks for your credit card details before taking you to the link, and identifies the person responsible for the law.

*that* would be poetic...

GrpA

Re:careful what you wish for

[Derekloffin]

Then put it behind a pay wall, or a robots.txt. If you can't be bothered with either of those two things then don't bitch that it gets indexed by a search engine.

Re:careful what you wish for

[Anonymous Coward]

> I just summarized it and provided a link.

You make it sound so simple. If you think you can do that better, do it. And get those ten thousand bucks yourself.

Google is doing something that _no one else in the world is able to do half as well as them_. I think they deserve their money for that. The "simple summary work" that you point out is way more complex than you make it sound.

So no, you are not entitled to a piece of that simply because you wrote an article.

Re:careful what you wish for

[stoolpigeon]

That's a completely backwards approach.

People don't use google because they know you write great articles. They use google because they are looking for something. The people writing on the other hand, really want people to see what they wrote. Google provides a free service to those writers, bringing in viewers without charging them anything. How can google do this? How can they provide this amazing service for free with all the hardware and bandwidth required? They charge advertisers.

If a site is so popular and so important that people do just want information from them - they wont be going via google, they'll be coming straight in.

If google were rehosting the full content - I could see it. But if they are just linking to things on the WEB - well, it should be obvious that what this law does is break the web. That's what really gets me. These news outlets see the web as a way to make money but they don't want anyone else to benefit from the information they provide unless they get a cut.

Following this logic, investors who read the business page should pay a percentage of their profits to the newspapers as well.

Re:careful what you wish for

[viperidaenz]

If you wrote an amazing article, and no one ever read it because they couldn't find it, why did you write it?

You then complain that a search engine is making money from your content and not compensating you, when they have told you exactly how to stop your articles from being put in their search results already (robots.txt) You want to have your cake and eat it too.
If you expect a search engine to pay for your content, expect them to ignore it completely. Watch as your userbase disappears and nobody reads your content or views your ads. You should be paying Google for every visitor they refer to your website, not the other way around. They spent resources crawling your website and indexing it and they sent your visitors to you, who click on your ads. You should be compensating the search engines.

Re:careful what you wish for

[infinitelink]

I have mod points and I would mod you down because your logic stinks rather than because I disagree, but I think it is worth commenting on:

Google is not making money on their content. Google is making money on the key words entered into their search engine, returning relevant advertisements to...the key words. The people go to the search engine to find content, but Google serves LINKS to others' content (not the content) most relevant to their search terms in order to ancillarily have the chance to serve ads relevant to the users' searches: note that there is an exchange going on here, though intangible and only conceptual: as per the user agreement between users and Google, the user gets to use their search mechanism, and Google gets to serve ads: only the users, therefore, could possibly claim to be owed anything, except they're being provided service, so rather it's they who should be paying (and are with their eyeballs).

What all this means, is exactly what others are saying around here: they just drop the French media, and not do those numbskulls the favor of facilitating contact by other eyeballs with their content: Google provides them with value, not vice versa: I would find poetic a de-listing by Google adding facilities that they may, for a recurring fee, opt-in to the search engine results.

Google only wants the few seconds they get with a visitor to serve ads, and these days they've plenty of their own content (and services, and deals with other content providers e.g. on Youtube) that they don't perhaps need to index and serve results pertaining those other media: I doubt they want to do that because it would make their searches slightly less useful to some, but when people start attacking a big dog to get a cut for something those attackers aren't due any share of, and syndicate with just-as-greedy politicians (who just want more money to spend), then it is time to say "bye bye".

Also, when Google actually puts ads relevant not to keyword searches but content itself, it is by the permission/request of the owner, and the owners are compensated on the click-throughs according to the terms of their agreements. Thus, we see here mere greed, gross ignorance, and unsurprising indignation at sensing a situation unfairness that could only be understood as such by the ignorant.

Re:careful what you wish for

[viperidaenz]

Following this logic, investors who read the business page should pay a percentage of their profits to the newspapers as well.

Don't give them ideas, you know they'll try it. They have a failing business model to prop up. Just look at the recording industry...

Re:careful what you wish for

[Sun]

I have mod points and I would mod you down because your logic stinks rather than because I disagree, but I think it is worth commenting on

I, too, have mod points. I do not agree with the above statement. Does that mean I should mod you down? In fact, I'm discarding all of my moderation done so far just so I can point this out to you.

You do not mod someone down merely because their logic stinks. If the person was trolling, that would be something different. GP did not seem to be, however.

The idea behind mod points is not to decide who is right. The idea is to weed out those comments unhelpful to constructive discussion, and keep those that promote it.

Now, had GP been marked "+5 insightful", I might be tempted to hit that "overrated" button. At the time of this writing, however, GP is +2 with no visible moderation, which is, in fact, a little below what it deserves, considering I'm sure others feel the same way, and considering the responses were reasoned and to the point (not that I can fix it now, that I've answered you, of course).

Don't abuse the moderation system. If someone writes a comment you don't agree with, just leave it alone. Disagreeing with you is not the same as trolling.

Shachar

Re:careful what you wish for

[guttentag]

The Washington Post was absolutely livid about the Drudge Report "deep linking" to stories on its Web site in the late 90s. It tried blocking him at first, but he'd find ways around it. Eventually they realized he was driving a huge amount of traffic to the site, which resulted in advertising dollars for them. But they were so used to being "the only game in town" in Washington DC (The Washington Times doesn't count; it's a church-funded instrument that has never operated in the black founded in 1982 by a guy who claimed to be the messiah) that they had this mentality that they drove traffic places, not the other way around. Eventually they recognized that they had no choice but to look the other way while Drudge continued deep linking, but a few people on staff still grumbled about him being a parasite profiting off of their work.

France and the U.S. have very different ideas about the media and intellectual property (for example, publishers in France set book prices and the bookstores can't discount them). There's a reason bookstores aren't dying there like they are in the states -- in fact, physical book sales are up. TFA in this case doesn't specify whether the complaint is about Google scraping entire pages from the site (for previews) or just displaying the brief summary, but that would seem to be where a line might need to be drawn. If a Google user can read an entire news story by squinting at the preview on Google's site without ever visiting the publisher that paid for the content to be written, I could see the French having an issue with that. But if their complaint is that you can search the text of their articles, see a brief summary of the article that directs you to the publisher's site, they're going to need to wake up and realize that Google (and similar search engines) are driving visitors and euros to them without having to make payments directly.

Would a restaurant complain about trademark infringement if the city put up signs with their logo directing people to the restaurant? Well, maybe in France.

Re:careful what you wish for

[moronoxyd]

They take the content for free then charge money for it (indirectly through advertising), giving nothing back to the source.

Wrong.
They direct millions and millions of people to the websites of those publishers.
And the publishers want those hits. Otherwise they could easily stop Google from doing so by using the robots.txt.

What actually happens is that the publishers want BOTH: Google redirecting people to their sites and getting money from Google for doing so.

Re:careful what you wish for

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story, bro, but what does it have to do with topic? It would be more like Amazon showing a cover and snippet from your book with a link to buy it from you and you getting furious because they're also showing their own ads alongside it - what the fuck, not everyone looking at that page buys my book, but everyone brings a few cents to Amazon? Unfair!

Government != people

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop saying "the French" and say "the French government" instead.

Being governed by incompetent morons doesn't make us so.

Re:Government != people

[PolygamousRanchKid]

"Every country has the government it deserves (Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite) "

-- Joseph de Maistre

De Gaulle

[surfcow]

"How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?"
  -- Charles De Gaulle

Re:Google's Biz Model

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

robots.txt

[FatLittleMonkey]

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Re:Google's Biz Model

[asdf7890]

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.

Re:But where to get it

[DJRumpy]

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.

Re:But where to get it

[toriver]

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.

Re:But where to get it

[dsvick]

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.