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."

Comments

Banned from Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

The French really want to be removed from the internet...

Re:Banned from Google?

[poetmatt]

Not quite. They want to get paid by force since they haven't tried to earn money via adapting to changes to technology.

Re:Banned from Google?

[Joce640k]

I wonder if they've ever heard of "robots.txt"?

Last I heard, Google was honoring it....

Re:Banned from Google?

[kelemvor4]

... Erm, yes! What do you think URL's are!?

Just because I'm not in the Phone book doesn't mean people can't call me.

If your business revolved around people calling you it means your business would probably fail.

Re:Banned from Google?

[kelemvor4]

I wonder if they've ever heard of "robots.txt"?

Last I heard, Google was honoring it....

That would work fine if they wanted to be removed from the index. They want to receive Google's indexing service free and they also want Google to pay them for the privilege of giving them free indexing services. I bet if Google dropped them from the indexes for a few weeks, they'd be begging to get back in.

Re:Banned from Google?

[icebraining]

Google does let you index block just the News bot without blocking Search; you just have to setup different rules for the "Googlebot" and the "Googlebot-News" useragent. (It's the same bot, but it complies with both rules if they're defined).

Re:Banned from Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see, you didn't ever visit Google News too.

I mean, yeah, right:

Review: 'Assassin's Creed III' a powerful sequelUSA TODAY - 49 minutes ago

A scene from 'Assassin's Creed III.' (Photo: Ubisoft). 12:40PM EDT October 30. 2012 - These poachers picked the wrong place to hunt.

Yup, got all I've needed from Google. Ok, let's pick another one:

Syrian air force on offensive after failed truceReuters - 1 hour ago

1 of 5. Smoke rises from what activists say was a missile fired by a Syrian Air Force fighter jet loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad at Erbeen, near Damascus October 29, 2012.

Got all I need! I know exactly where the strikes were - in Syria! No need to know about what city, what scale, what consequences, Google told me everything.

Or this one:

Celtics' Doc Rivers won't reveal starting power forwardUSA TODAY - 34 minutes ago

Comments. Boston Celtics coach Doc River has several candidates to open at power forward Tuesday against the Miami Heat. Jared Sullinger 10-30-12.

Who cares who are those candidates? Google told me everything - they've got canditates and there's several of them! No need to find out who are they at all.

Next one:

Hurricane Sandy: What's Climate Change got to do With It?ABC News - 17 minutes ago

This photo provided by 6abc Action News shows the Inlet section of Atlantic City, N.J., as Hurricane Sandy makes it approach, Monday Oct. 29, 2012.

See, they've posted the answer to the headline's question right there in the summary! Nope, not visiting that article, no need to.

TL;DR: you can't be arsed to visit the site you're bashing. Well, I can't blame you, facts kinda get in the way of a good bashing.

If it's really just snippets

[WOOFYGOOFY]

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.

Here's a hint

[gman003]

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.

Re:Here's a hint

[HexaByte]

Yes, indeed. Will these newspapers now put their publications behind darkened glass paper dispensers, so that no one will just look at the headline and decide no to buy it?

"We want free advertising of our product, but don't want you to make any money doing it for us!" Google should consider charging them for advertising they're giving them.

Re:Here's a hint

[Baron_Yam]

"Google should consider charging them for advertising they're giving them"

I like this solution. Google should announce that they will be billing back any fees levied in France against the newspapers they index, plus a bit for administrative overhead. Any paper that doesn't like it can be banned from Google's index.

The French will come back

[SternisheFan]

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.

Google....

[Anonymous Coward]

Should just drop their sites from their search results,

Minitel

[alexander_686]

That's o.k. - They still have Minitel.

Re:Minitel

[jmauro]

Nope. It shut down on 30 June 2012

But what about Mutual Benefits

[happy_place]

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.

Don't see the argument really

[krelvin]

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

Re:The usual black and white responses

[0123456]

Sounds good. And the newspapers can share some of the profit they make from Google pointing people toward their stories, then everyone wins.

Hollande's strategy: sneaky taxes.

[CharmElCheikh]

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.

Re:Avoiding the real question

[0123456]

Maybe if the average newspaper contained 'content' which wasn't freely available on the web or had more intellectual content than 'Temporary Star X has bought a new dress', people might be willing to pay for them.

Re:robots.txt

[Uberbah]

Google is a megacorp of the kind that people protest all the time.

No. They're not.

Is Google getting billions in taxpayer subsidies like oil companies? No. Is Google getting billions in taxpayer bailouts after blowing their assets on get rich schemes? No. Is Google a monopoly ripping off their customers? No.

Do you have an actual point here? No.