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Google and Facebook 'Must Pay For News' From Which They Make Billions (yahoo.com)
Internet giants such as Google and Facebook must pay copyright charges for using news content on their platforms, nine European press agencies said. These giant platforms, news agencies said, make vast profits from news content on their platforms. The call comes at a time when the EU is debating a directive to make Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players pay for the millions of news articles they use or link to. From a report: "Facebook has become the biggest media in the world," the agencies said in a plea published in the French daily Le Monde. "Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom... They do not have journalists in Syria risking their lives, nor a bureau in Zimbabwe investigating Mugabe's departure, nor editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground." The agencies argued, "access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth."
Stop linking to any news from the group(s) that don't want them "making billions" by linking news articles.
Wonder how long those news agencies will take to change their minds?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Let those new outlets get their own clicks the hard way, instead of having FB and Google funnel people straight to them. Spoiler alert: I won't see their articles anymore.
This is a problem on all sides. On one hand, Yes, the producers need the funding to keep producing high quality -and very expensive- reporting. If Google and Facebook simply stop linking to actual news then the revenue those orgs depend on will dramatically decrease. Further, then the only "news" most people will see will be cheap opinion pieces. News orgs have long loved opinion editorials because they are really, really cheap to produce -and are really quite popular. If this goes through, then you will see investigative reporting drop even further.
The solution already exists, and is already in use.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I don't they understand how the internet works. The articles are not reprinted wholesale, only linked to. Facebook and Google make money as an aggregator, and then you go to the media's site and see the full article, and their advertising. Everyone advertises on their own platform.
As someone else noted, the American media largely understands how this works. The EU proposal is just some bizarre misguided rent seeking for the media industries there, which will end up blowing up in their own faces as they no longer receive the majority of their traffic.
FTS: "They do not have . . . editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground"
Given the quality and bias of news that is passed on to the public, neither do these 'news' agencies.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom
Don't start giving them ideas...
On the other side, If they built a newsroom, no idea how much would that cost, but anyway if they did, and then they linked preferentially to that news source, the same outlets to complain now for being linked, would be crying illegal monopoly at the top of their lungs, and demanding to be linked on equal standing.
I guess that the main lesson here is that seismic technological transitions always have somebody with the foot in the wrong place.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
The obvious answer is to shamelessly ask that the government require Google to link to these publications, while also requiring that Google pay for the pleasure of being forced to do so.
Useless whinning from dying dinossaurs.
I'm not completely unsympathetic to what they are saying, but the perspective is all wrong, and it's not all that dissimilar than the whole discussion about piracy. Pointing fingers at all the wrong places will lead you to no results.
See, no matter how much you cry about this, Facebook, Twitter and Google are not "stealing your content" themselves. It's the users. And no matter how hard you try, there are provisions in law that protects these platforms from their users actions. This won't change because there are far bigger things in play here than your news rooms financial needs.
There's no viable route where one of these social networks giants will say "fine, we'll pay you some ammount of money because people who uses our platforms keeps sharing your content".
Because if they open that Pandora's box, they'll also be taking responsibility for all the crap that is shared there. That's a whole other level of responsibility and liability that will be thrown against the companies to a point they won't be able to keep profitability anymore.
And do you really want to tie yourselves as employees of these corporations?
But much like piracy, the solution should be relatively easy to understand: you want your content to be monetized, you want to be compensated for it, you want a viable solution where your work is paid for - look at content creators that are not still living in the past.
What do YouTubers do? What newer platforms do? How are modern newsrooms sustaining themselves? How can you still make a profit when people are accessing your content without traditional methods of payment?
The answer is there.
These press agencies have got to stop displaying such an incredible ammount of ignorance about the platforms they are trying to get a foothold on, and hire people who can come up with ways of monetizing their content on web platforms. It isn't a secret, and it's pretty much everywhere these days.
I'm sorry if the Internet has changed the funding dynamics of traditional news, entertainment industry in general, and other stuff - but face reality and fall in. This whinning will result in nothing.
Furthermore, I think Facebook users, who are having their accounts and many other things scraped and datamined by Facebook every single day, should be paid for their data -- and don't tell me "they're being paid by being given free access to the site", because that's bullshit, what Facebook gets from it's users pays them orders of magnitude more than it costs to run the site, hence the huge amount of money Zuckerberg has. Facebook users should have an 'account' that shows them exactly how much money they've accrued from Facebook as compensation for their privacy being invaded, which can be withdrawn at any time, or allowed to accumulate and paid interest at the going rate for a typical savings account at a bank. It's not like there isn't precedent for this; don't people on YouTube get money from advertising clicks? Not much different.