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."

Comments

Re:So then leave 'em high and dry

[dj245]

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.

Is it good for healthy societies to have one or two giant for-profit companies controlling most of the news people see? There are three forseeable outcomes-
1. The aggregator manipulates which stories are shown based on payments by the news organizations, or by 3rd parties
2. The aggregator tries to show the user exactly what they want to see, and hides articles they do not want to see
3. Combination of the above

Re:Simple solution for Google & Facebook

[lazarus]

Right. But isn't this was robots.txt is for? Perhaps we need to update the RFC to indicate that the page(s) are okay for search results, but not okay for aggregators? Seems like a simple fix that doesn't involve lawyers.

Re:Wambulance

[networkBoy]

I may have been unclear...
I meant to imply the content (news) creators are thinking "It's not fair" that Google and FB is getting a bigger slice of the pie.

Thing is, FB and Google pour piles and piles of money into their infrastructure to actually handle the massive load that ultimately funneled users to the news sites, so I think they do deserve a rather big hunk of the pie...

Re:So then leave 'em high and dry

[Solandri]

All 3 points also apply to regular news services.

I suspect that like the piracy argument, your argument is based on the false assumption that if news aggregators didn't exist, these people would got their news from "better" services and be better informed. It's more likely that if these people weren't getting their news from Google News or Facebook, they wouldn't be getting any news at all. i.e. The problem isn't the aggregator, the problem is some people just don't actively seek out news.

I hit several news sites daily (including ones I dislike but feel I should browse just so I'm getting a complete picture). I also go through Google News in case there's something these "major" news sites are omitting, on the theory that a computerized algorithm will have less bias than a human editor at selecting which stories are important.

That's how I learned about 2 people dying and 57 people being hospitalized due to drug overdoses at a Florida music concert on June 1, 2016. That was the same day there was a murder-suicide at UCLA which was all over the national news and even preempted regular broadcasts in Southern California for live news coverage. The drug story barely made it out of local news even though it had just as many deaths and far more injuries. Because most of the news organizations are biased against guns, to them a negative story about guns was more important than a bigger negative story about drugs. In this case, Google News was superior to the regular national news outlets.

Re:Simple solution for Google & Facebook

[mikael]

Many forums ask users not to "cut and paste" more than a few lines from a story and to provide a link to the original site. Otherwise that runs into copyright issues if users just summarize the whole article. That's the problem. If the original news site doesn't get clicks they don't get advertisers.