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France Applies Tax Pressure To Google For Republishing News Snippets
Qedward writes "France may introduce a law to make Google pay to republish news snippets if it doesn't strike a deal with French news publishers before the end of the year, the office of French President François Hollande said. French publishers want to share in the revenue that Google earns from advertising displayed alongside their news snippets in search results. Readers are often satisfied by reading the headline and summary published by Google News, and don't feel the need to click through to the news site, the publishers say. In this way, Google profits and the content creators don't. The publishers want to be able to charge Google to compensate them for ad revenue losses."
The French really want to be removed from the internet...
If it's really just snippets of a larger value proposition that people are allegedly willing to pay for, then I think this is better known elsewhere in the world as "free advertising".
Sorry France. Love your healthcare system, but this is just silly.
If people can get all they want out of a headline and a paragraph, maybe you should focus on making the article have more *content* and less fluff.
I use GoogleNews, and it's a great way to learn about the world. Newspapers from different countries have made the same complaint as French papers are doing now. A few weeks/months later, after they see their website 'hits' go way down, they ask to be part of GopgleNews again. I expect the same is going to happen here.
Should just drop their sites from their search results,
That's o.k. - They still have Minitel.
I wouldn't know the majority of news sites if it weren't for Google's aggregation. So I wouldn't click their sites at all. This seems like they're wanting compensation for something that already compensates them by listing them and making their site more visible.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
If a site doesn't want Google to make money off of their content headlines... then they can easily opt out of having Google pick up their data and index it.
But NO... they WANT the exposure and get a cut too.... if the law is passed, cut them off. Simple
I'm certainly from this group.
However this view avoids the real question: How is online content going to be paid for?
Newspapers already cannot make enough money off of online advertising to pay for the creation of their content.
I don't see internet users lining up for (a) micropayments or (b) some kind of universal subscription, and they're definitely not thinking about (c) maintain subscriptions to each of the 50 newspapers and magazines who post articles they want to read.
Seriously, why can't I get a Slashdot or Google subscription for $50 a year to read all these articles without ads and with the ability to retrieve them infinitely?
Your average newspaper's website would have to improve in navigability and reliability too.
There's a lot more to this question than one lawsuit can answer.
Maybe newspapers who don't want to get republished by Google should learn about "robots.txt"? Granted, it's more than a decade old, but it still works.
I wonder if France realizes if they do this, Google will just pull french news sources from their site.
It's a Lose/Lose situation, Google has less news, these french sites get significantly less traffic.
Sure they might be complaining they don't get much, but i can guaran-fucking-tee you they'll get less without Google.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Legitimate news reports don't "create" anything. You can't "create" facts... you can only observe them and record them. You can't really own a fact either.
Or are they suggesting that french news reporters somehow also manufacture the facts?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Sounds good. And the newspapers can share some of the profit they make from Google pointing people toward their stories, then everyone wins.
Francois Hollande's government has been pulling new creative taxes out of their asses for a little while now. That one's completely silly but it's not the only one. Another one is a new tax on beer. I guess that's how he figures he will raise France problems: raising even more taxes, yey! That's new and usually very popular, right? The fact that it's very sneaky could have worked... if people didn't notice. Some taxes are too silly to get unnoticed. Some others are surfacing up, like a new 15% tax on rents. People are getting pissed. He'd better put these taxes to EXCELLENT, EXCELLENT use or else he's out at next election.
My
That's a really excellent point. People have been complaining for decades or centuries that the news is either contentless, or yellow journalism, or salacious.
There should be a news source for people who really don't care about Honey Boo-Boo. Usually, that's a high-quality newspaper like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times.
I wouldn't mind if we lost all the "news" that was contentless, yellow or salacious (gossip). The perception is that many more people "want" that news than not.
It could be that as newspapers go bankrupt, we see another part of the equation: more people are willing to pay for real news than for the Honey Boo-Boo, or rather, that people who like Honey Boo-Boo "news" aren't willing to pay for it.
The French government being in a dead end, having to find money wherever it is, and Google, making a lot of money, represents an ideal milk cow. In return, Google would be in a dead end if they accept the French tax: the rest of the world will want their share of the cake.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
If Google won't play ball, expect French news headlines and first sentences to start sounding generic:
Lawmakers vote today
Today's traffic
Tomorrow's weather
Defendant hears decision from judge
The real "news" will be 2 or 3 sentence down.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Will these newspapers now put their publications behind darkened glass paper dispensers
The paper version of the Wall Street Journal has been doing this for decades: They only show headlines and article summaries above the fold, counting on you to want to buy the paper to read more.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They own the copyrights to the material they write, and should be able to (try to) charge for others, including Google, to use that.
No, they should be able to stop Google from using it if they don't like the terms. If only there was some easy way to politely tell Google not to index certain pages. Then the french newspapers could do that, if they don't want certain readers to read what they have freely put on the web.
Which web search engine have these control-freak news sites been promoting instead of Google?
And you are wrong. It does not matter how much content they add. Look, most of the news, many of us (and I would dare , the majority) do not care at all about the detail, the title line are enough. "PSG win 1-0" "Hamas put a bomb in tel aviv" "Obama announce a new tax". "greece economy sink even more" they are news for which i will look at the title , may even skim the summary, then not even *bother* reading the in depth article.
As such the newspaper are right. I read google summary and the newspaper, despite having done the job of putting the article, will get nothing, whereas google will simply copy a few summary paragraph and get the doug.
Now you could argue all the way that the type of viewer like me is rare (I don't think so, from my colleague i know a lot of "skimmer" like that) but the bottom line at the end is google taking a *bit* of content from the newspaper, get advertising money potentially, and the newspaper *nada*.
Now it could be that if google drop the indexing of the article of the newspaper , the newspaper suffers in readership, but I am not sure of that. If I can't skim off google, I would be forced to go for the real source.
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What ads? I don't get any ads with my Google News headline pages.
I guess if France wants their percentage of zero .....
Have gnu, will travel.
You're thinking of Wikipedia.
There is already a middle way available. Any newspaper can tell Google: "We've blocked you from indexing us via our robots.txt file. Share some of your profits with us, we will unblock you and everyone wins." Google wants to win, so it would voluntarily accept any 'everyone-wins' proposal.
Of course, this might not be a situation where everyone wins, but one where Google loses. (Asserting that everyone wins does not make it so,) The people at Google are smart enough to evaluate this for themselves.
How is this much different from reading the headline through the glass at a paper vending machine? The newspapers ought to be paying Google for the traffic.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Many commenters here oversimplify the problem. Do not forget that Google is in a monopolistic position. Deindexing newspaper web pages could be considered as Google using their monopoly as an advantage.
And then, it becomes much more interesting as Europe is constantly probing many companies for such evil monopolistic behaviors. Europe could force google to index these newspapers, and France has much more legislative influence over Europe than Belgium which attempted the same kind of tax, several years ago.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
This is like suing the shopping mall your store is in because people in the mall don't want to come into your store. It's not the mall's fault!
The eventual equilibrium saddle for this, after everyone is done punching and counterpunching, is:
(1) The new law destroys the fair use provisions of France Intellectual and Property Code, Art. L. 122-5(3)(a)
(2) Content providers may request payment for content on what was previously "fair use"
(3) Google offers free listing to those who allow indexing of content (a cross-licensing agreement)
(4) Google considers indexing any content requiring payment to be advertising, and charges for it
(5) Net zero money actually exchanged
(6) France taxes the "listing" and "advertising" transactions
The result is a net loss in revenue for both Google and the French newspapers by the amount of the tax.
I'm pretty sure that the only news sources not opting into a cross-licensing agreement would be state-run news organizations.
One final point: Google could always just set up the advertising fees formula such that they always balance at a net zero loss to Google after the French tax, putting the entire burden on the French providers who do not opt into the cross-licensing.
Given how Google handled the French-language press in Belgium, and that they've already said they'd stop indexing French news sites if required to pay, I think it's fairly obvious that they will make a stand.
Indeed, the current major complaint from the French government is that saying they'll de-index rather than pay is "threaten[ing] a democratically elected government."